An Ending
by Losi of Sun
Summary: The Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter has been found, and new characters and old in the Roundworld are being stalked by Auditors! A crossover of Good Omens and the Discworld series and an epic tale for all to read! :D Please do.
1. Prologue Thingy

_Hello! This crossover is being written by two co-authors, just as Good Omens was! We decided it would be fun to put ourselves into the story, so we're the two inexplicable girls that show up in the prologue thingy and in first show up in chapter two. This is a pretty fun crossover (at least in our opinions) of Neil Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, with some references to Douglas Adams and Doctor Who. The ironic thing? WE'RE AMERICANS! Yeah, thing is, the best sci-fi comes from Britain. Well, unless we're talking about Orson Scott Card, but then again he's not as funny. Anyway, we've read so much English literature that we think we can pull it off. The only thing I noticed is that the British don't use the word 'awesome' a _whole _lot, but I do use it (a lot. hey, it's an awesome word!), so that word is in there anyway. But let's stop reading my blithering and go onto the story. Enjoy!_

In the beginning of the end...

There were two girls.  
There had been many other girls before them and they probably wouldn't be the last, but they were significant enough during this time to be mentioned. They weren't what you normally depicted when you thought of teenage girls. They weren't really that fashion-conscious and didn't read very many vampire romance novels and weren't really that rebellious as teenagers go. In fact, they were rather geeky, were big fans of science fiction and fantasy, played trivia quizzes for fun and squealed over things like the new Harry Potter movie coming out. But they were like other two friends in some fundamental ways as well, such as the fact that they argued.

"But Charlotte, dark chocolate is so bitter!"

"Wonderfully bitter! It's mixed in with the sweet and it's just _heavenly_... white chocolate is sickeningly sweet."

"It's not _sickening_, Charotte, it's just sweet. Maybe you haven't tasted good white chocolate."

"I've tasted white chocolate Easter bunnies."

"Then no, you haven't really."

"But, _Jin AaAaAah_..."

"But _Jin AaAaAah_ what?"

"Dark chocolate is more _real_ than white chocolate."

"That doesn't make any sense, white chocolate is just as tangible."

"No, dark chocolate is closer to being _actual _chocolate!"

"And what is actual chocolate? Awful and bitter."

"But it's more natural!"

"But the point is, white chocolate tastes better."

"Not to me."

"Oh. Then I suppose it's a matter of opinion."

"Then dark chocolate would be in the majority!"

"How do you know that?"

"I can just tell."

"How?"

"I dunno, I have this affinity with dark chocolate and I can tell the opinion of it from people worldwide."

"Charlotte, you're silly."

"You're silly for liking white chocolate!"

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

"Let's stop this futility before it gets too far along ."

"Understood. But...dark chocolate is _bittersweet_... Everyone likes a bittersweet ending than a sickeningly sweet ending. You know, except my grandma."

"Who said that chocolate had anything to do with stories?"

"It has everything to do with them. When you read a book, you eat chocolate. When you watch a movie, you eat a box of chocolates. Well, you know, when you have the chocolate."

"Yes, but that - never mind..."

They were sitting on a bench in a park, feeding bread to the squabbling ducks. Two men with serious faces were talking on the other side of the pond, obviously spies. But the girls kept looking at the ducks.

"Jin Ah?"

"Yes, Charlotte?"

"Do you think ducks like chocolate?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Everyone likes chocolate."

"True, but you can't be sure about ducks."

"I guess."

Charlotte threw an entire slice of bread into the pond. None of the ducks went after it and she watched it slowly become a soggy mass of brown gunk and sink to the bottom of the pond. She frowned. She never liked it when something was wasted. Jin Ah threw a little piece of bread at them and twenty ducks started squabbling for it at once. Both of them silently concluded that ducks certainly weren't the brightest species of the animal kingdom.

"Jin Ah?"

"Yes, Charlotte?"

"Can we go and get some chocolate?"

"I thought we were going to go to that bookshop."

"Oh yeah! Okay. After the bookshop?"

"Sure."

Silver little snowflakes started to fall, covering up the tracks that they had left in the snow to get to the bench. More snow on top of more snow, on top of dead leaves and making everything purely white. It was in this situation that the two girls seemed to swap personalities.

"Oh, it's snowing!" said Jin Ah pleasantly.

"Yeah," Charlotte put on a half-hearted little smile. She didn't really like the snow.

"It's so pretty!" continued Jin Ah.

"I suppose, sometimes," admitted Charlotte, who mostly saw the slush. She liked the springtime better.

AN ENDING

A crossover of Good Omens and the Discworld Series, occurring in the last few days of the Roundworld and the Discworld, and being helped along by:

_Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter: Ye Saga Continues!_

Written with some lovely Footnotes and references to Douglas Adams and Doctor Who by the real Jin Ah and Charlotte, who are ironically Americans.

_DRAMATIS PERSONAE_

SUPERNATUAL BEINGS

Aziraphale (An angel, more of a book keeper than a book dealer, and Southern Pansy)

Crowley (A demon and Bentley driver who wears sunglasses, even when it's overcast)

((we'll add more as we come to them))

APOCALYPTIC GODS

Odin (Father of the gods and lover of clean, white linen sheets)

Thor (A god of the thunder and the sky, with anger issues)

Baldur (A god of all things pleasant and wonderful, the favorite child)

Loki (A troublemaker whose only purpose is to annoy the gods)

WIZARDS

Rincewind (A Coward So Yellow He Once Ran Away From a Pigeon)

Mustrum Ridcully (The Archchancellor of the University)

The Librarian (Who is Very Fond of Bananas)

Ponder Stibbons (The Only One Who Gets Any Work Done)

The Archchanchancellor of Brazeneck (Formerly Known As the Dean, Also Known As Henry)

The Bursar (Who Exists On A Somewhat Different Level of Sanity From Everyone Else)

IMPOSSIBLE BEINGS

(Either thought to be impossible or simply are impossible)

DEATH (Death)

Ridley McCoy (A Flying Man)

Dr. Fletcher (A Doctor Who Can Do Anything)

HUMANS

Jin Ah (A Lover of Purple)

Charlotte (A Lover of Yellow)

Agnes Nutter (A Very Awesome Witch)

Anathema Device (A Formerly Former Occultist and Professional Descendant)

Newt Pulsifer (A Man Who Failed to Be a Witchfinder More Than Any Other)

Sophie (Assistant of the Impossible Doctor)

THEM

ADAM (An Antichrist with a Big Imagination)

Pepper (A Girl Who is Never Pippin Galadriel Moonchild in Her Presence)

Wensleydale (A Boy, Otherwise a Youngster)

Brian (A Boy with Built in Dirt)

MORE THEM

(sort of)

Genevieve (A Girl, and Annoying Little Sister)

William (A Boy, and Annoying Little Brother to the Annoying Little Sister)

Jayha (A Boy, and Annoying Little Brother)

AND:

Dog (The Antichrist's Dog and Former Hellhound)

Archie (The Impossible Doctor's Guinea Pig)

The Luggage (Made of Sentient Pearwood)


	2. Chapter 1

_So! Decided to go on reading, did you? Thought that it was interesting enough? Thought that it was worth your time? :D Yay! I'm so glad you think so, and I hope that you have us much fun reading it as we have fun writing it. That argument that we wrote is an actual argument that we had (to the best of our rememberance) when I came to visit Jin Ah over the summer. That's right, we argue over CHOCOLATE. Not to say that chocolate isn't worth arguing over, of course. Anyway, the main character in this chapter is completely original, just so you know (that's why we're writing so much information about him). Please keep reading! _

Chapter One 

Once upon a time, there was a child who loved to read.

Now, that, in and of itself, was not a problem. The problem, you see, was that while he was very good at understanding words, and letters, and books, and such things, he was not nearly as good at understanding people. And while books can be very helpful, in many ways, one thing they cannot do is make you friends. And so Ridley McCoy was a very lonely child.

And he grew up a lonely teenager, and became a lonely adult, and although he still loved to read, he didn't have any more friends than he did as a child. Less, in fact, because his pet goldfish named Trevor died when he was seventeen.

Ridley McCoy worked as a teacher in a small school, and, as children so often are nowadays, most of his students had plenty of friends, but hated to read, and so he didn't understand them, and they didn't understand him, and Ridley quite often went home with a headache and had to lie down for a while. A few times it got so bad that he had to lie down for quite a bit, until he awoke in the middle of the night in a panic and remembered that he had half a class's worth of essays left to grade. At that point he would have to go grade them, running through nearly an entire box of red pens, and then would have to go lie back down with an even stronger headache than before.

In the end, he wasn't really sure why he still pursued teaching, except for maybe that small hope that he would someday meet a child who didn't seem completely hopeless to understand, and maybe he could teach to love reading.

Until that day, though, there was only one thing that kept him sane:

Ridley McCoy could fly.

He would crawl up to his roof on Sunday mornings, when he still had a bit of weekend's work to do but really, truly and seriously didn't want to do, and breathe in the rather windy air, and look out at the other rooftops, and spread his arms out dramatically, and take off, just like that. Sometimes he would see how far he could go, maybe make it to London, and look down at all of the busy people and cars and lights running about, or out at the country and see the little white dots that were sheep. Other times, he would see how high up he would go, until the air became too thin and too cold and he was just left looking down at the now suddenly rounded planet, and be free from the fear of falling. Gravity just didn't work on him for some reason, and he loved it.

Apart from his flights, though, which had grown increasingly rare over the years, there was really very little that Ridley looked forward to. He wanted something _exciting_ in his life - something spectacular, something out of the ordinary (he didn't count flying in this, because flying might be very nice, and fun, but, it wasn't really something that he thought of as a grand adventure), something that he could talk to his coworkers about and they would look at each other and make little signs that meant, "Poor fellow, I'm afraid he's gone a bit loony..." but somewhere deep down _they would be wishing they were him_. He wanted something extraordinary.

And the problem with wishing is that sometimes, you get what you wish for.

It all started one winter morning, with a note that he found in his mailbox. It was addressed to him: Mr. Ridley McCoy, 1066 Wintergreen Avenue, London, England. There was no return address.

Puzzled, he took it inside and left it on his table to open later.

He forgot all about the letter until he sat back down at the table to eat his lunch. It wasn't anything particularly appetizing (horseradish and cold mustard - he was, regrettably, out of beef) and so he decided to open his letter first.

Deare Mafter Ridley McCoy,

it read.

A certayne Incydence of Fate needf you to appear at 7a, Dimwell Streete, Soho, Londonne Towne, Englande, on the forteenth houre of thif day. It wille be expectyng you promptely, fo do notte be layte. The fayte of the worlde rather depenndef on thif, Mafter McCoy, fo do not try to defy thif; you wille fimpley be brought there in any cayfe. It if fate, after all.

Yourf Refpectfully,

Agnef Nutter, Wytche.

Poftfcrypte: Iffe you shoulde telle any other humanne of thif Lettyre, expect miffpellyngs galore in alle youre ftudentf' paperf for the reste of youre Life.

For a moment, Ridley just looked at the letter. Who was Agnes Nutter? What was all this fate nonsense? And what was so important about this... place, whatever it was? It reminded him of email. There had once been a person claiming that they desperately needed his money in it. He, being rather afraid and unsure of what to do, had stopped using the computer all together. It still sat in the corner of his bedroom, unused and unkempt, collecting dust, and facing the wall. (Footnote :The first night, when it had been facing him, he could have sworn it was staring at him the entire time.)

This letter wasn't asking him for his money, but it was asking something of him, and it gave him that same afraid, unsure and very uneasy feeling that that email had given him. Especially since it was threatening him and saying that resistance was useless...

Then he looked over at the stack of essays that he still needed to grade.

He checked the time on the analog clock on the wall opposite him. 12:49. He still had time.

In a sudden burst of adventurousness, Ridley decided to fly there. It had been a while since he had attempted to climb up to his roof, and it took a bit of trying, but eventually he made it up there. It was not windy today. It was overcast and gray, in danger of snowing any minute now. The frosty air bit at his fingers, his breath came out in little white puffs, and he tightened up his coat a bit more securely around his shoulders. It was going to be a chilly flight. Without ceremony, without a sign, his feet simply lifted off of the ground. He rose higher and higher and higher, then he swooped down and suddenly he was soaring...

When he was younger, he had often worried that someone would see him, but he had grown to appreciate the human mind's ability to ignore the fantastic. It was like they had some sort of built-in sensor in their heads that would say, "Oh, look, a man flying. Clearly, that's impossible, thus there isn't really a flying man." And, strangely enough, they would _believe_ it. Oh, occasionally there was someone who hadn't developed that sensor, but they were largely ignored. Most of them were children, who were used to seeing things that their parents couldn't, and the minority that were the adults usually went and had their story told in a tabloid next to stories about alien kidnappings and Elvis being sighted in South Dakota.

But finally Ridley was hovering over London, shivering, and clumsily took out the letter that he had concealed in his inside pocket.

_Dimwell Street, Soho._

He happened to know the street, and as soon as he had found it among the dizzying map of the convoluted roads and alleys below him, he attempted indiscriminately touching down on the ground.

Unsurprisingly, he succeeded.

Brushing himself off, he walked carefully down the street (footnote: You never knew what sort of disgusting mess could be underfoot - he had stepped in what looked and smelled suspiciously like pickled ice cream once.). He wasn't sure where 7a was - he had never heard of such a number - but no doubt he could find it. It wasn't a large street.

Behind him, a little girl said, "Mama, Mama, that man was flying!"

"That's nice dear," said a distracted voice.

It wasn't long before he had found the building marked '7a'. He had to think that he wasn't overly impressed by its appearance. It looked dark and dingy, and the door hinges and knob seemed rusty and unused. It had no outward appearance of what it was meant to be, except that it was a shop. So, stuffing the letter back in his jacket pocket, he tried the door and went in.

There was a small tinkling sound to herald his arrival, but nothing as momentous or loud as he had secretly been expecting. It was a little dusty, and the bookshop smelled like old paper.

"Hello?" he called out. "Er - is anyone there?"

No response.

Puzzled, Ridley walked over to a shelf. Maybe he could find something to read while he waited for the sender of his mysterious letter.

To his surprise, most of the bookshelves were stocked with comics. They looked like rather old ones, and were in surprisingly good condition - but they didn't seem like the kind of books that would belong in that bookshelf. Ridley had never really been fond of comics, so he looked for another book. His gaze fell upon one - it was old-looking, with a leather binding.

At this point, there should have been some sort of earthquake, or some sudden kind of glow about the bookshelf, but, alas, real life rarely works the way it should. As it was, Ridley didn't feel anything at all - not even a slight chill running down his spine - until he reached out and pulled the book out of the bookshelf.

It was titled: Further Nife and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter: Concerning the Worlde that Is To Com; Ye Saga Continuef!

Agnes Nutter. There was that name again! It was eerie. And it was a book about prophecies... In that letter she had talked about fate! But where did this saga 'continue'?

"Hello?"

Ridley jumped, the book falling out of his hands. Before he could blink, though, the man behind him - well, in front of him, now - had bent and caught it.

"Dear, dear," he said, brushing some dust off of the worn leather binding. "Dropping books? I'm afraid that just won't do."

"Erk," said Ridley. "Who's Agnes Nutter?"

"Sorry, my dear?"

"Who's Agnes Nutter? Er, she, wrote me a letter, I think, and she wrote that book, too, that one that you're holding in your hand?"

"What?" the man looked down at the book he was holding. His eyes widened. "Crowley!" he yelped. "Come over here!"

No one immediately came, and Ridley was quite concerned as to who he was talking to.

"But please, could you tell me who this Agnes Nutter i-"

Suddenly, the book keeper had whipped his head around in the direction of the door. There, more floating than standing and looking rather horrifying indeed, were three strange, dark, hooded figures.

"Hello," said Ridley politely.

The other man's face was horror incarnate. "Oh _no_! What are you doing here!" He turned to Ridley. "Go! There's a room in the back! Now! I'll try and hold them off!"

"Er, okay, then …"

Feeling completely and utterly bewildered, Ridley found his way to the back of the store, where he walked through a small door into the store's back room. In the shop, he heard voices still saying muffled and incomprehensible things...


	3. Chapter 2

_This is the chapter that introduces us into the actual story! Yay! Very pleased to meet you, too! Anyway, if you haven't reviewed the last chapter, would you please review this one? It would be nice to see what you all thought! We have a lot of fun making this, don't we Jin Ah? … Jin Ah? Well, it seems that Jin Ah's off somewhere else at the moment, so let's again stop my incoherent blithering and get on with the story! (Don't worry, I'll make sure she makes some kind of comment for the next chapter.)_

Chapter Two 

"Excuse me, could you tell us how we could get to the antique bookshop that's around here?"

Crowley turned around, and found that he was looking at two young teenage girls who were looking expectantly back at him.

"Uh, yeah, I was actually going there myself."

"Oh, what good luck," said the shorter of the two. "Can you give us a ride?"

"No!" the other one hissed. "You don't get rides from strangers! For all we know he could be some sort of ... satanist who's going to kidnap us and sacrifice us to the devil!"

Crowley made a kind of strangled noise which was a laugh trying very very hard not to happen. The two girls looked at him, puzzled, and slowly started to edge away.

"Oh don't be silly, Jin Ah, he's just a man wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses on an overcast day."

"Normal people don't wear sunglasses when it's overcast! Those are for creepy psychos that want to look cool!"

Crowley glanced at his watch. Already, nearly a minute had gone by since he had gotten Aziraphale's panicked message (footnote: The two were, in a manner of speaking, telepathically linked. It wasn't nearly as romantic as most stories made it out to be; rather, it was a lot like telephones - they would use it if they really needed to, but neither of them really liked using it, and of course there were the times when the other person didn't pick up (ostensibly because they were busy, but more likely because they didn't feel like it) and he was sure the angel needed him there, right now. Well, for a given value of _needed_ - Aziraphale was an angel, after all, and as such had considerably more resources than most people - but still. Aziraphale was a friend, of sorts, and he and Crowley had taken to helping each other out over the eons.), and now these two girls were holding him up.

As a demon, it would have been perfectly within Crowley's rights to rush to his car and drive away (footnote: Crowley's car knew him well enough to start driving as soon as he got in, regardless of whether Crowley had turned on the ignition, or even if he had the keys in his hand at all.), blowing exhaust fumes into the two's faces as an added bonus. But his friendship with Aziraphale had caused him to absorb some of the angel's horrible _empathetic_ qualities, and so, he said, "Look, I'm not a satanist - they're rather … odd, people, actually, but not too bad once you get to know them - and I'm not going to kill you, or do anything else that might be considered illegal or even slightly psychotic. And I need to leave, now, so if you want a ride, speak now or forever hold your peace."

The two girls looked at each other. "Well, I suppose we could drive with the door slightly open," the taller one said doubtfully, "and if he tries anything funny, we could jump out and scream for help."

The one in yellow rolled her eyes. "Yes, Jin Ah, I think we'll be fine." She turned to Crowley and smiled politely. "Thank you very much, sir!"

Crowley sighed. Children. He walked over to his Bentley, which had unlocked itself, and got in.

"'Scuse me," said the girl with glasses, the one who had accused him of being a satanist, "but I didn't see you unlocking your car. Do you have one of the new things? Where you can just open it from far away so you don't have to fumble with a key?"

Crowley thought for a second, and said, "Yes," which was technically true.

"This is a pretty awesome car," said the shorter girl. "But it looks ancient! How do you keep it running?"

He ignored the question and started the started the car. Since this was Crowley, it meant that he thought of the way to Aziraphale's bookstore, and the car started driving to it.

"Sir," said the girl in yellow, "Excuse, me but your car is driving itself! Shouldn't you, er, keep an eye on the road?"

"No," said Crowley offhandedly. Why had Aziraphale asked him? He had tried calling him over the telepath, but the angel wasn't picking up. The nature of the telepathic link meant that he could feel a bit of what Aziraphale was feeling at any given time (unless the angel specifically blocked it) and he felt … busy. And stressed. That was odd - it was nearly Christmas, and what with brotherly love and kindness and all that and the little children being extra-good to coerce their parents into buying them all sorts of ridiculous things, Aziraphale's workload was usually rather light around now. (footnote: to be fair, so was Crowley's. Snow meant traffic jams and skating accidents, and Crowley was sure that there was no small-scale evil as malignant as hail. He hated hail.) In the back, the girls were arguing cheerfully about how wise the decision they had made was. He wondered why in the world they wanted to go to that bookstore, anyway.

"I think we're here, sir," said one of the girls.

"Are we really?" Crowley hadn't been paying attention. Ah, so they were. "Well, get out, then."

"Thank you very much," they said politely, before jumping out of the car. Crowley noted that yes, the one with glasses had been holding the door slightly open the entire time. He had contemplated driving them into some alley somewhere and threatening them with one of the medieval torture weapons he had in his trunk, just for the fun of it, but he had decided against it. They would probably scream and cause a great deal of fuss, his Bentley might get scratched, it could attract the attention of some policemen, and besides, Aziraphale would be so disappointed if he ever found out.

Speaking of Aziraphale, what was wrong with him? Crowley had expected the angel to be on the pavement, waiting for him, but he couldn't see anything.

The girls, though, apparently could. They were standing with their noses pressed against the dusty glass of the bookstore's front window.

Crowley snuck up behind them, as only Crowley could sneak. "What's going on, then?"

The words had hardly left his mouth before he saw it, too. There was a … commotion going on inside the bookstore.

Said commotion was Aziraphale, with a large ax, trying to whack several gray hooded … _things_ out of the air. It would have been silly and funny if there weren't something … sinister … about the gray shapes.

The one with glasses backed away and pulled at her friend's sleeve. "Uh … Charlotte, maybe we should come back again another day."

So the one in yellow's name was Charlotte. What was the other's name again? He couldn't remember.

"We should call for help!" said Charlotte, looking horrified. "He could - he could get hurt!"

"Which one?"

"_All of them_!" she shrieked. She looked appealingly to Crowley. "Do you have a phone?"

Crowley did have a phone, but he didn't think Aziraphale would appreciate human police barging in on … whatever he was doing. "I've got a better idea," he said brightly. "Why don't we go inside and ask what's going on?"

"I don't -" the girl who wasn't Charlotte started to say, but he snapped his fingers and they jerked obediently to attention. Ah, well, if they had gotten here and seen all that, they might as well be useful. "Come along, my little minions," he said. (footnote: Crowley had always wanted to say that, but until now, a suitable occasion had never come up.)

Inside, Aziraphale saw the faces staring in at him. Blasted humans! And - Crowley? What was he doing, just standing there? Why wasn't he coming in?

Aziraphale almost paid for his moment of distraction with half his head. As it was, he managed to duck the Auditor's axe (invisible to most) quite neatly and swung his own axe towards where the Auditors knee would be, if he had knees. Of course, by the time it got there, the Auditor and his possibly-existent knees (footnote: It is quite possible that the Auditor's knees were like Schrodinger's cat: until Aziraphale looked, the knees would be both there and not there at the same time. To Aziraphale, this meant that the knees were somewhat ghostly, and maybe only _looked _ like they were there, or perhaps he needed to study his metaphysics a little longer.) were on the other side of him.

"Resistance is useless!" the Auditor barked.

Aziraphale groaned inwardly. Already, they had only been in the bookstore for - what, a minute? - and they had started picking up cheesy one-liners.

"Exterminate!" the other one yelled.

"Look," said Aziraphale, sighing, "that's not right, that's for Daleks. You lot are Auditors, shouldn't you be saying something like, 'Delete!'' or 'Audit!' or - I don't know, you're not making any sense!"

"'Delete''s Cybermen," came a sudden voice from the doorway.

Aziraphale turned and breathed a sigh of relief. "Crowley!" he said delightedly.

"Yes, yes, I'm very glad to see you, too, and all that, but, Aziraphale, I really think that while you're fighting men with axes you should - WATCH OUT FOR THAT AXE!"

"Well, of course, but lower your voice, Crowley, I don't see why -"

Aziraphale had a very good reason for cutting himself off in mid-sentence; namely, his head had just been chopped off.

Crowley sighed and shook his own head. "Really, you should pay more attention when I tell you to."

The gray figures looked immensely satisfied, despite their lack of features. "We have exterminated him," one said (Crowley would have sworn it said "exterminate" with a kind of invisible smirk) "and now, we will exterminate YOU!"

"You know," said Crowley, "if you're going to take over the earth, or, for now, try and kill me, you really need to work on your threats." He shifted his weight, and now, he was holding a machine gun - a great, big, hulking one. He smiled. "Aziraphale might have preferred an axe, like you, but _I_ fancy myself firmly in the twenty-first century." And he pulled the trigger, sending a round of bullets through where the figure's heart would be, if it had a heart.

In theory, what should have happened was that the gray shape would have collapsed, possibly bleeding. In reality, the bullets passed neatly through it and into the row of antique Superman comics directly behind him.

"Watch out!" helped Aziraphale. "Those are expensive!"

Crowley looked down. "Oh, sorry, didn't see you there." He turned to see the two girls still staring at him blankly. "You, there, be useful. Pick up his head and make sure it doesn't get stepped on."

They both immediately bent down to obey his orders, bumping into each other in the process. Crowley mentally banged his head into a wall. The mind-controlled could be so mentally incompetent.

"Bullets won't work," said Aziraphale helpfully.

"No, really, I had figured that out for myself," Crowley shot back.

"Try food," Aziraphale suggested.

"What?"

"Food! They're not used to sensory stimulation! Shoot food at them."

Crowley shrugged. It was worth a shot. What could he - oh, yes.

Smiling evilly, Crowley mentally loaded a round of … different bullets in to his gun and lowered it at one of the figures.

"Fool," it sneered. "Your little metal balls are useless against us!"

Crowley ignored it and opened fire.

"Ha!" it laughed. "Ha ha ha - oh."

It exploded.

Not stopping to gloat, Crowley swiftly put an end to the other one as well.

"That was fast," noted Aziraphale. "What was it?"

"That, angel, is blue cheese."

"_Ah._ Well, that makes sense."

The enigmatic Auditors had been reduced to a small cloud of black smoke, swirling around on the floor with the effect of dry ice or liquid nitrogen, and it was steadily seeping towards the shop door.

"We will return..." they whispered to them menacingly. "We will come back for the one who defies us... There is no escape for you..."

And, before they had realized it, they had left, leaving an icy chill to hover about them.

"What was that all about?" asked Crowley to the general public.

"Search me," Aziraphale answered, embittered. He'd never liked the Auditors. They were necessary, of course, but there was something about them that had always made him very uneasy. Especially now, when they had just cut off his head with an ax. "Who are these two, and what are they doing here?" he asked Crowley, who was holding his head a tad gingerly in both hands.

"Oh, er, well, I just happened to bump into them on the way here, and..." Crowley trailed off, and picked up somewhere else. "They said that they were heading here as well and asked for a ride."

"You mean they wanted to come _here_? And they asked _you_ for a ride?"

"I was just as surprised as you."

"Huh. Why are they just standing there with blank faces? ...You've got them under mind control, haven't you?"

"Well..."

"Alright, release them, then, you know I don't stand for that sort of thing."

Crowley snapped his fingers and both immediately came out of it. Their heads turned toward Crowley, then toward the head in his hands, took a moment to take this in, and started screaming like banshees.

"Oh, come now, come now," said Aziraphale, still in a bad mood. "You don't have to completely freak out like that. I'm just a head. Crowley, turn me round so that I can look at them properly." He did.

The girls stopped, but were still looking with horror at the disembodied talking head.

"That is..."

"Weird," Charlotte finished.

"Let's introduce ourselves, shall we?" started Aziraphale coolly. "My name is Aziraphale, and I'm an angel, and that's Crowley and he's a demon. Delighted to make your acquaintance, now who are you?"

After both girls seemed to have finally come to grips with themselves (which, admirably, wasn't _too_ long), they politely introduced themselves.

"I'm Charlotte Elizabeth Poe," said the girl in yellow. Her shirt was yellow, her sweater was red and unevenly buttoned, her skirt was blue, and she was wearing yellow galoshes, apparently for walking in the snow in. "You can call me Charlotte." Her name sounded very Classically English.

"I'm Jin Ah Kim," said the girl with glasses. She wore a purple sweater and gray sweatpants, with black galoshes. She was wearing black glasses. Her clothing would normally have screamed "sensible," if not for the fact that she was wearing her sweater backwards. So, sensible with a good dose of absent-mindedness. "Pleased to meet you." Her name sounded very Korean.

"How did you... take your head off?" asked Charlotte tentatively.

"One of those nasty Auditors did it," said Aziraphale, still bitter.

"I tried to warn you," scolded Crowley.

"Well, you didn't have to shout, I could have heard you just as fine with your voice lowered."

Crowley was getting a bit annoyed and was about to retort when Jin Ah cut in, "Yes, but how are you still... er..."

"Alive?" helped Aziraphale. "I'm an angel. I can't very easily die, can I?"

"You're an angel?" asked Charlotte, wide-eyed.

"Why yes, dear girl. I held the flaming sword, but I - er - gave it away..."

"That was probably a mistake," said Crowley.

"Yes, but I _told_ you, the wolves were coming, and it turned out all right _in the end_, didn't it?"

"Just saying."

"Oh," said Charlotte. She hadn't heard of him (footnote: She hadn't really read that much of the Bible. Being a Mormon, she had read through the Book of Mormon twice before she was nine, but had only attempted getting through Genesis once, and it had been pretty tough going. She had heard something about a flaming sword, but wasn't that sure. JinAh, on the other hand, _had_ read Genesis, but she didn't remember anything about a flaming sword).

"Er," said Jin Ah, who seemed to have been thinking about something, "When you said that you were a demon … do you mean … as in the biblical sense?"

"Yes," said Crowley.

"So you _are_ a satanist?"

"No," said Crowley. "Certainly not. I suppose I serve him, in a technical sort of sense, but eh … the celestial bureaucracy is worse than ever nowadays, and mostly I don't report to _him_ as much as I do a couple demons in Forward Planning." He paused and reconsidered his previous statement. "Well, a couple of demons from Forward Planning that are demons in more than the metaphorical sense. Satanists are very … different. You'd know if you'd met them."

"He's a little touchy about that," Aziraphale interjected. "Bad history there, you see. With satanists, I mean. Now put my head back on, Crowley, this starts feeling very strange after a while."

Obediently, Crowley went over to the angel's body and neatly reattached the head, the muscle, bone, and tissue knitting neatly back together.

The angel coughed, picked himself back off the floor, dusted off his jacket sleeves and straightened his coat.

"Sorry, about that."

Just then, there was the creak of a door opening from behind them, and a worried head poked out.

"Hello?" said Ridley.

"Mr. McCoy!" exclaimed Jin Ah. "What are you doing here?"

Ridley McCoy just stared at them. What were _they_ doing there? They had less business there than he did.

"Who's that?" Crowley asked, interested. "He looks like me."

"Not really," said Aziraphale. "He's rather taller."

"Just have to put me down at every opportunity," Crowley grumbled.

"And he has light hair," said Charlotte.

"And he has freckles," pointed out Jin Ah.

"And his glasses aren't tinted black," said Charlotte.

"So all in all, not really," said Jin Ah.

"Well, yes," said Crowley, who really didn't know when he was beaten, "but you have to admit that we do look rather alike, apart from all that."

The angel, the two girls, and the man who could fly all turned, looked at each other, and shook their heads.

"Well, what are you doing here, Mr. McCoy?" asked Charlotte, feeling curious.

"I'm not really sure myself," said Ridley with a shy smile. "I got a letter this morning, you see, telling me to come here, so I decided to find out what it was all about. What are you two girls doing here? Shouldn't you be enjoying winter vacation?"

"We are!" said Charlotte. "We came over here to check out old books."

"We heard it was a really good store for them," Jin Ah explained.

"Who told you that?" said Aziraphale quickly. Goodness, if this trend continued, he'd end up having _customers_ in the store. He shivered at the thought.

Jin Ah looked at Charlotte. "It was Anathema, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, I think so." She turned to the others. "She's a really awesome lady that lives in Tadfield, uh, we know her because she comes here a lot to drop off the Them for our Saturday camps. My sister's their same age, so she organized it. She's good at things like that."

"The Them?" "Anathema _Device_?" Aziraphale and Crowley asked at the same time.

"Mhm, I think so," said JinAh. "And the Them are Adam Young, Brian, Pepper, and Wensleydale - well, Wensleydale's real name is -" she frowned. "Actually, I don't know Wensley's real name, but I assume it's not _Wensleydale_."

"How do you know?" asked Charlotte, smiling.

"Wensleydale? Can you imagine it? His parents would have to be insane!"

Charlotte shrugged. "Think of poor Pepper."

Jin Ah had to concede, but she couldn't go down without a final argument: "Yes, but Wensleydale's father works in a newspaper office, doesn't he? His parents aren't hippies. Plus I think they call him Youngster sometimes."

"Wait, wait, wait," said Aziraphale, who had been watching the two's discussion with a certain degree of interest. "Back up. How do you know Anathema? And Adam? And his … posse? Sure, you go to the same club, but they live in Tadfield! That must be, what, an hour -"

"Half an hour," said Charlotte. She smiled. "It's amazing, what they can do with technology these days."

"Yes, yes, but how do you know them?"

Charlotte left it to Jin Ah to explain. She was better at that than she was.

"You see," said Jin Ah, taking a deep breath, "Adam'smother'soldersister worksatthe sameplaceas Charlotte'sdad and theythoughtthat Genevievewho'sCharlotte'ssister mightbefriends - I think she thought Genevievemightbe a gentlinginfluenceonAdam - and so and then wemetthemandwe gotalongfinetoosoweall -" she had to gasp for breath here; Crowley was impressed she had gone on for so long -  
" Newtdoesit and that'showweknoweachother and CharlotteandI ." She took a final breath.

Charlotte gestured her practiced jazz hands towards Jin Ah. "Tada!"

Crowley and Aziraphale were staring at them. "Er," said Aziraphale, "are most children like this nowadays?"

"No," said Ridley, sighing, "they're much worse."

"How do you three know each other?" asked Crowley, who at that last remark had found his suspicions.

"He's our English teacher," chirped Charlotte, lightly patting Jin Ah's back as she gulped for air. "What was he doing in that back room?"

Ridley shrugged his shoulders and looked towards Aziraphale.

"Hiding from the Auditors," he explained. "It was too dangerous for any mortal to be there at that moment."

"Who are the Auditors?" asked Jin Ah, now recovered.

"That would take much too long to explain here," said Aziraphale, who still hoped that they might be able to simply … rearrange … the girls' memories and send them out of his bookstore before they damaged anything (footnote: as an angel, Aziraphale was by definition a friend to all children but had found that most of them didn't like him very much and had learned to regard them as miniature forces of destruction.).

"We've got all day," said Jin Ah cheerfully.

Her friend nudged her. "Um, Jin Ah, I think maybe we should leave, he looks like he's having a hard day -"

"Yes, Charlotte, and we just saw a man - well, not a man, clearly, but an angel, which is even weirder - get his head chopped off by a bunch of gray things that are immune to bullets but can be defeated with cheese! I think we deserve some answers more than they deserve some rest!"

Charlotte thought about this, nodded and decided to agree with her friend. She was right, there was no missing out on something as exciting as this.

There was another tinkling sound, and they all turned to see Anathema Device standing in the doorway, panting. She looked like someone who had been running very, very quickly.

"Oh, good, you're all here," she said. "Did I miss anything important?"


	4. Chapter 3

_**Charlotte:** Hi! I'm gonna be making a comment or two at the beginning of the chapter, and Jin Ah's going to be making a comment at the end of the chapter. I think this is going to be our longest chapter yet... A roadtrip chapter! Our first Douglas Adams reference comes out in this chapter – see if you can catch it! If you've read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, that is... Um! Anyway! We just got our first follower, which I am _very_ happy about! PLEASE feel free to review it, recommend it to your friends and such (if you think it's worth it, anyway...) and we'll have the umph and stamina to keep updating! Oh! By the way, we just added another "chapter" to go before our original first chapter, so if you've alread started following us, please go back and read that._

Chapter Three

They stared at Anathema in appreciative wonder. "Excuse me," said Crowley, "was there some sort of meeting being held here that I wasn't aware of?"

"Yes," said Anathema. She looked behind her. "And where _has_ Newt gotten to?" She sighed. "He's probably parking his little Wasabi someplace where it'll get towed."

"Isn't Wasabi a kind of food?" asked Charlotte.

"Yes, and it's also a horribly made Japanese car. Although I admit he says it's been running a lot better ever since … the incident." She glanced at Crowley and Aziraphale.

"I thought you all forgot about that!" said Aziraphale. He looked flustered.

"We did," said Anathema, "mostly. But it's all coming back now."

"_Why_?" Crowley felt like he was about to cry. He knew what it meant: there was something else coming. An end-of-the-world kind of something, probably. And he didn't want it to all happen again. The last apocalypse had been bad enough, and _it_ hadn't even happened.

Ridley, Charlotte and Jin Ah all felt that they were missing out on something here. They weren't quite sure which questions to ask, though, so they just stood there, floundering around in a lot of conversation that they didn't understand.

"I'll explain once everyone else gets here," Anathema said.

"Who's everyone else?" said Aziraphale worriedly. He didn't want any more people in his bookshop than strictly necessary.

"Oh, not too many people. Newt, Adam and his little gang, Madame Tracy, Shadwell - they don't really have to be here, but Newt thought we ought to invite them, for old times sake - oh, and Dog."

"Dog? _Dog? DOG_?" Aziraphale went into the corner and quietly started to weep (footnote: He stopped as soon as he realized he was crying on a rare edition of _Jack Cade, Frontier Hero_. Nervous breakdowns were all very nice, but books were more important.). Everyone ignored him, except for Ridley who felt that he ought to do something but had no idea what.

"What demented person would name their kid Dog?" asked Charlotte quietly. (footnote: Charlotte had only ever had one pet in her entire life. She had gotten a fish when she was seven, and had named him Charles Elliot, although everyone called him Sam. He died a few months later and they'd never had another pet since, so, when names were mentioned, she didn't usually think of animals. Jin Ah had never had a pet either, but she did have enough sense to think that "Dog" probably wasn't a human.)

"Don't worry, Dog is a dog," explained Anathema, "which is probably why Aziraphale over there is so devastated. Oh, and let me see that."

Anathema took the book in Ridley's hand. "Crowley, do you have anything to do with this being here?" she asked in clipped tones, looking at the book with a certain amount of contempt. "I'd thought we'd burned this some time ago."

Crowley looked embarassed, but was saved from having to say anything by Newt rushing in.

"Anathema!" he said. "I can't find them anywhere!"

"What?"

"Adam and his little … cronies! I swear they were right behind me then I stopped to look at something and now they're gone!"

There was an aggrieved sigh from behind him. "'Scuse me, Miss, but I think your fiancee needs to pay more attention to his where'bouts."

"Adam Young!" Anathema's hands flew up in despair. "You are a _mess_!"

It was true. Adam was covered in head to toe in quickly melting snow.

Aziraphale looked up from his corner and screamed. "Snow! Wet! Snow! Water!" he blubbered.

Crowley shook his head. "What _are_ you going on about?"

"HE'S GOING TO RUIN THE BOOKS!" Aziraphale shrieked.

Crowley rolled his reptilian eyes. "Then stop him." He snapped his fingers (footnote: Crowley didn't actually _need_ to do this, but he liked it. It felt cool, although to be fair to Crowley, he needed cool like the government needs helium (subfootnote: How much helium does the government need, you ask? The answer is none, but that's just what the government _wants _you to think.).). Adam's grubby clothes and glorious hair were suddenly dry and well-ironed.

"Thanks," said Adam.

"Can you do us, too, sir?" asked Wensleydale, who, along with Pepper and Brian had snuck in behind Adam. Pepper was holding Dog, who was barking inside a carrier case wrapped in several scarves.

"I didn't think you'd want him covered in snow an' filth," explained Adam.

"That was very … kind of you, Adam," said Aziraphale weakly. "You know, I think I'm going to go lie down now…"

"There's no time for that," said Newt. "Adam, next time, you shouldn't dawdle."

"Hullo, Adam, Pepper, Brian and Wensleydale. Haven't seen you in a while," said Charlotte. She enjoyed greeting her younger sister's little friends.

"Oh, er, hi, Charlotte," said Adam. "And Jin Ah, too."

Adam's eyes wandered over to Ridley. He didn't recognize him, but could see what he was.

"How come _you_ get to be able to fly?" he indignantly asked Ridley, who jumped and looked at the boy with a sudden sort of terror.

"H-how do you know...?"

"You can FLY?" Charlotte and Jin Ah shrieked at the same time.

"Er, w-well..."

"Ah, so you must be the Onne (footnote: Anathema was one of the rare people who could _pronounce_ silent letters. This was one of the many different things she had managed to inherit from Agnes Nutter.)," said Anathema, who, while everyone had been blithering on, had taken a deep breath and opened the Further Prophecies to see what was inside.

"I... what?" Ridley was now more flustered than he had ever been before in his life, more flustered than even some of the rowdiest days in the classroom. She didn't care to explain, however, and just kept on going, pointing at Charlotte and Jin Ah this time.

"Which means that you must be the Two." She smiled serenely and continued, "'Who did notte knowe what they were doing.'"

The girls had stopped mid-squeal to hear what she was saying.

"I, er, …" said Charlotte. "What's that mean?"

"You have no idea what you are getting yourselves into, my dears," she said, shutting the book and handing it to Newt. "But we all need to find out exactly what that is. Come on, everyone! We're going to my house."

"Again?" complained Pepper. "We only _just got_ here."

"I'll let you ride shotgun," Anathema promised her.

"Shotgun? YES!" She stuck her tongue out in Adam's face. "And Adam here was thinkin' he was going to ride shotgun back."

"But, Anathema," complained Newt, "I thought you didn't like the back of the Wasabi. You specifically told me that you hated the puce-colored leather and the way it managed to be both scratchy and sticky at the same time."

"Who said _you_ were driving?" was Anathema's reply.

"Oh," said Newt. "Of course."

They ended up taking pity on Newt, so he went in the Bentley with Aziraphale, Crowley, Charlotte, and Jin Ah, while Anathema took the Them in her car. Madame Tracy and Shadwell had sent Newt a letter saying, unfortunately, they had gone on a cruise to the Bahamas, but they sent their love, and Shadwell reminded Newt that even good witches could be dangerous, and that he should always keep a firelighter and some matches handy, something he neglected to tell Anathema because he _knew_ good witches could most certainly be dangerous.

Ridley had inquired about how they would get _him_ there, but Anathema had replied with a curt, "You can fly, can't you?"

He had tried to reply, "Yes, but it's a bit of a long way over there and I already took a fairly big trip over here, and it's a very blustery day and very cold and it looks like it's going to blizzard soon.", but Anathema had already ushered everyone out to the cars.

He was left, for a moment, quite alone in the dingy shop. He sighed and went outside. Everyone was already shutting their doors, and then driving off. Ridley sighed, looked down the street, took a deep breath, and ran all the way down the corner for momentum. He kicked off right at the street sign, took off, rushed into the gloomy sky, and looked down to search for the Bentley and the Wasabi.

Charlotte and Jin Ah had watched him, neglecting their seat belts and peering out the window to see with envy their English teacher who could fly.

Newt, in the back seat with them, trying to look casual about it, shifted around in his seat to look out the window as well.

After a while, Jin Ah and Charlotte backed away from the window (they couldn't see the flying man anymore) and looked sideways over at Newt (who hadn't seen the flying man at all).

"Hi, Mr. Pulsifer(footnote: It was a rule that her mother had strictly enforced upon her children that they always, _always_, addressed adults with Mrs. or Ms. or Mr. and then their last name- unless, of course, that adult had said otherwise. Anathema had, and so Charlotte and Genevieve (and their young brother, William, if he ever had the mind to address her at all) were free to call her Anathema, but they hadn't been around Newt enough to be able to call him anything other than Mr. Pulsifer.)," Charlotte finally said. "How are you and Anathema doing?"

"Oh, fine, fine," he replied, not really used to making small talk with teenagers.

"Say, when are you two going to get married?" she asked, after a moment's silence.

"Oh, er," Newt tried to remember. "Sometime in... June, I think."

"Ah, yes, classic," said Jin Ah. "Hera's month. Very romantic."

"My parents were married in June," offered Charlotte.

"It is quite a while away, though," said Jin Ah. "All the way over in summer."

"Er, yes," said Newt. He thought a moment, and looked over at the two girls. This must have all happened quite fast for them. "Do either of you know what's exactly going on here?" he asked.

They looked at each other, smiled, looked at him, and shook their heads.

"Right, well, er," Newt took in a deep breath. This was going to take a while. "Less than a year ago, there was this ..._incident_. You see, the apocalypse was at hand, you might say. The four Motorcyclists were riding the roads, the Antichrist was discovering his powers, and an angel and a demon were sent to make sure that it all went according to plan. That angel and demon were the men in front of us right now. And... they weren't really sure they wanted to carry out Armageddon. The Antichrist was Adam Young."

"_Adam Young?"_ they gasped.

He nodded. "Adam Young. He was meant to be someone else, I think, but there was this mix up in a hospital full of Satanists or something, I don't know, I wasn't told the whole story. So Adam, the son of the devil, grew up to be a normal boy... more or less, anyway."

"But what do you and Anathema have to do with all that?" Charlotte asked, while Jin Ah was thinking that, as far as Adam was concerned, it was less rather than more.

"Yes, well, I was part of this... group, employed by a man named Shadwell, and I was employed to do... certain things. A lot of going through newspapers... Er, yeah. And I was out doing what he had instructed of me when this Tibetan literally just popped out of the ground, and I crashed, and well... Okay, to make a long story short, I ended up at Anathema's house and discovered that she had this _book_."

"What kind of book?" asked Jin Ah.

"It was called The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, and it was full of prophecies that had been fulfilled or were yet to be, and very specifically, it prophesied the end of the world. We were even less sure that we wanted the world to end than Crowley and Aziraphale, and were out to stop the Antichrist, and his posse, and the Four Motorcyclists, but... he did it himself."

"Who did?"

"Adam! He had grown up a normal life, and was able to think that the world didn't _have_ to come to an end. So he just refused to go forward with the plan. Those three friends of his, apparently they were able to get rid of the embodiments of War, Famine and Pollution. And then Adam managed to get Death to go away as well. I mean, not really, just got him to fly off... I don't know. And then Heaven and Hell tried to convince Adam, and we almost thought that they'd got him, but Aziraphale was brilliant. He pointed out that this was the _ineffable_ plan, and that we can't know exactly what God is planning. That convinced them."

Jin Ah considered this and Charlotte gave a little secretive smile.

"Then, later, we - me and Anathema - got a package in the mail. And it was Further Nife and Accurate Prophecies. We decided not to look inside."

"Why not?"

"It's... complicated. But in the end we burned it. Though, apparently not, because it just barely showed up in Aziraphale's shop. But now, I suppose, the prophecies in that book are just starting to be fulfilled. That's why Anathema said the things she did. It was all part of the prophecies. There are a lot more things going on than we originally thought."

Charlotte's grin was too great to be contained on her face. "Did you hear that, Jin Ah?" she said excitedly. "We're in a prophecy! Us! OhmygoshohmygoshohmyGOSH! This is just SO COOL!"

JinAh smiled weakly. "Yes, that's very nice, but, uh … did you say … the end of the world?"

"Yes," said Newt. "It was all very … fast, though. I don't really remember much."

"And did you say the Four Motorcyclists? Who are they?"

"You know," said Newt. "War, Famine, Pollution, and Death."

"I thought there were four _Horsemen_," Jin Ah said, "and it was Pestilence, not Pollution."

"I think Anathema said something about Pestilence retiring," said Newt. "And even anthropomorphic personifications change with the times, I guess."

You may be wondering why Aziraphale and Crowley were being so quiet during this discussion about something which had been so important in their lives, and they had a very good reason for it. The reason was that the two of them had been having a loud, silent discussion in their heads ever since they got in the car.

It went something like this:

Aziraphale: Why didn't you come sooner?

Crowley: I came as soon as I could! And those two girls were holding me up! Besides, if what Anathema says is true, then it was all Fate, anyway.

Aziraphale: WATCH OUT FOR THAT TREE, CROWLEY. Yes, Anathema. Did _you_ put that book in my store? And why didn't you tell me, Crowley? I thought we trusted each other!

Crowley: Well, I … I thought … I thought you had too much on your plate, as it was, and come on, we both know that you would have gone all obsessive and poured through the whole thing and obsessed over it and took notes, and it was the day before we were going to go play golf, and it would have been so boring you just sitting there. Besides, I didn't think it would all happen so soon! I assumed we'd have at least another century for me to tell you!

Aziraphale: A century? You were going to wait a century? For something of this magnitude? Crowley, I - WATCH OUT FOR THAT PEDESTRIAN, CROWLEY - I can't believe this of you! I mean, yes, you're a demon, _technically_, but I thought you'd developed responsibility and trust and all that!

Crowley: I'm not in the mood, Aziraphale.

Aziraphale: Well, I always said that evil pays the price for its own wickedness. You must be regretting not giving it to me sooner.

Crowley: Aziraphale, I said, I'm not in the mood.

Aziraphale: And who's fault is that? Yours.

Crowley: Aziraphale, for an angel, you are one of the most annoying beings I have ever met, and considering that I'm a demon bent on corrupting humanity, that's saying something. I admit, I should probably have told you sooner, but -

Aziraphale: CROWLEY, WATCH OUT FOR THAT BUILDING.

*silence*

Aziraphale: You know, Crowley, maybe I should drive.

Crowley: One scratch, angel, and … you'll have to pay next time we take lunch together.

Aziraphale: Crowley, I highly doubt that I could do much worse to your car than _drive it so fast it catches fire_.

Crowley: There were extenuating circumstances!

Aziraphale: Yes, but you didn't have to drive your Bentley! You could have run there! We both know that you have enough stamina for that, whereas _I_ was stuck in the body of a sixty-year-old woman.

Crowley: But I would have been all sweaty when I got there.

Aziraphale: So? You were trying to save the world, weren't you?

Crowley: But … the Bentley has _style_, Aziraphale. The sunglasses have _style_. The suit has _style_.

Aziraphale: Ah yes, of course, _style_. That's the first thing we should be thinking about when we're fulfilling prophecies, isn't it? Crowley, you can be so mind-bogglingly _idiotic_ at times.

At this point, the other people in the car broke in.

"Mr. Aziraphale?" said Charlotte. "Er … how come … he was driving the car when we started, wasn't he? But how are you driving it now?"

"You must have been mistaken," said Aziraphale, who was primly keeping his eyes on the road.

Jin Ah poked her friend. "Charlotte, remember that we are in a car being driven by an angel, previously driven by a demon, and we are meddling in occult forces that probably ought not be meddled in but are really quite _fun_."

"Oh, right," said Charlotte. "In any case, I'm quite glad you're driving. Mr. Crowley dresses quite nicely, but his driving leaves something to be desired. I'm sure we actually drove off the highway almost up a tree at one point, except I wasn't sure if I should say anything."

There was a silence where Aziraphale looked at Crowley and Crowley stuck his hands in his pockets, whistled, and pretended not to notice.

Meanwhile, in the Wasabi:

"It ruddy well is!"

"It ruddy well isn't!""

"Says who?"

"Says the President of the United States!"

"No he doesn't! Why would he care about Norse gods walking the earth?"

"'Cause he could use 'em for battlin' in the wars and stuff! An' he hasn't used 'em, so they can't of. They all went away a long time ago. They're probably helpin' aliens with their battlin', now."

Adam thought about Norse gods and aliens for a moment and had to bitterly commend Pepper for the idea. He wasn't going to stop arguing his point, though. "Yeah, but who says they can't of come _back_? They could of come back sometime and the President didn' even know it."

"I bet they failed to save Mars," said Pepper, getting wind of her theory now. "An' then they wen' over here an' gave up after there was no more battlin' left to do, and now they've gone off to Jupiter!"

"Actually, I think Jupiter is uninhabitable," cut in Wensleydale, much to Adam's relief. "There's lots of storms goin' on there and all that, all this lightning and clouds. Made out of nothin' but weather."

"See!" said Pepper, thinking this to further prove her idea. "Thor's makin' it all stormy there, and that's why it's uninhabitable!"

Adam licked his lips and got ready for another retort. "When's the last time they checked how the weather's over there, then?"

The rest of the Them shrugged.

"I suppose they're just assumin'," offered Brian.

"See?" said Adam. "I heard there's been a big storm in Northern Ireland last week, blew over lamp posts and stuff! It could start headin' here to Tadfield right now!"

A deafening clap of thunder shook the skies.

Anathema, who had been gritting her teeth from having to listen to their shenanigans, hit her head against the wheel while the other three Them groaned at Adam for making it storm.

"Sorry," he said quietly.

There was silence for a minute inwhich they looked out at the gloom.

"I wonder how that flyin' man's doin'," said Pepper, brightening up a bit. "He might get electrocuted!"

"It's raining!" Newt said. He banged his head against his palm. "And I forgot to close the windows! Anathema is going to _kill _me!"

"Already closed," said Crowley tersely. He had somehow regained control of the wheel.

"Oh. I forgot you could do that."

"I thought we talked about you driving, Mr. Crowley," said Jin Ah nervously, "and why you're er, not supposed to."

"Crowley drives faster," said Aziraphale, and indeed the car seemed to be going much faster than it had gone previously - faster, in fact, than any car that Newt, Jin Ah, or Charlotte had ever been in, and that's counting roller coaster cars (footnote:Charlotte had been on two roller coasters, each just once, when her choir went on tour to Seaworld, and had found that she rather liked them. Jin Ah had been on rather more, and she loved them. It was the feeling that all the flesh on your face was trying to flee in terror.)

"I wonder why it's raining when it's been snowing for the last week..." Charlotte trailed off. "Aah!" she said suddenly. "Mr. McCoy! He's up there! And it's raining!"

"There's lightning up there in those clouds, isn't there?" Jin Ah asked. "If Mr. McCoy dies, it could mess up the whole prophecy! And we'd have to get a substitute for school, and you know how I _hate_ substitutes!"

"Nevermind we'll have to get a substitute and a prophecy can't be fulfilled, a man will be dead because we couldn't find a way to get him to fit in one of our cars!" said Charlotte sadly. "Though the substitute thing, I admit, is pretty bad, too."

As soon as a bolt of lightning had whipped through the air very close to where he was, Ridley had immediately started dropping. He just let himself fall (it was quicker that way) and caught himself about ten feet above the ground and then touched down slowly in the field below him.

He looked on, shivered violently, and had just about no idea how he was going to get to Tadfield. He'd never actually gone there before.

"What were you doing up there, sonny?" a gruff, deep voice from behind him said. Ridley whipped around to see a very tall, very buff, and very Norse-looking man. The big man looked down at Ridley (who was 6 feet stone) with beady blue eyes.

"Uh, I was er, um... well," Ridley floundered around for words for the second time that day.

The other man ignored this. "Have you dominion over the skies now?" he asked him.

"I... what?"

"Are you the god of the Sky on Earth, having come to replace me?"

"...Replace you?"

"Yes! For I am Thor, Once Mighty God of This Earth, having gone to help or thwart other worlds, and have come back to this one!"

Ridley blinked. Thor? Really? This day was only getting stranger...

"W-why?" he asked half-heartedly.

"I have been called! Called by the one person on this earth who can."

"And who's that?" His words were bland and tired. His hair was steadily getting more and more soaked, and he clutched his not very water resistant coat more tightly.

"I don't know," he said. "I was... rather hoping you did. Now, what is your name, god of Sky?"

"Er... Ridley."

"Ridley? Really?"

"...Yes."

"...It doesn't really have that much of a _punch_ to it, does it?"

Ridley thought. "I... suppose not," he said. "I'd never really thought about it."

Thor grunted.

"So, where are Odin and Loki?" asked Ridley, just for kicks.

"They should be coming soon, I don't know what could be holding them up. Haven't seen them in a long time... Odin's been on Pluto, you know. Quite lonely out there. I had Jupiter, much more exciting. Have no idea why someone would want to go and live on a big rock all alone."

"I don't know," said Ridley quietly. "Maybe he'd want to go and settle down for a while, have a quiet, peaceful life..." The rain kept pelting.

Thor snorted.

"Anyway, you look troubled, Ridley. What's the matter?"

"Well, I'm trying to get to Lower Tadfield."

There was a pause. "Where is this... lowering of a tad of the field?"

They looked at each other for a moment, equally vacant expressions on their faces.

"Right, you've been on Jupiter," nodded Ridley. "Well, it's over there," he pointed in the direction he had been going (hoping it was still the right way), "and I'm having rather a hard time getting there because of the storm and weather."

"Oh," said Thor.. "I seem to have forgotten myself. Sorry."

Immediately, the skies seemed to clear.

"There, I'll leave you about an hour or so to get there safely. But I must start the storm again after that, for only then will Odin, Loki, and my brothers be able to find me. Travel safely!"

"Alright..."

Ridley took off again, a bit uneasily. He hadn't been used to anyone watching while he started flying, and now he could feel this strange man's eyes planted firmly on his back. Once he was in the clear and sunny sky, though, it wasn't so hard. He just had to follow the highway and hope that he could catch up with the Bentley and the Wasabi up there ahead...

"It's sunny outside!" Brian exclaimed, and the others bent over to look out the windows and above them. Sure enough, the sky was blue.

"Where are the Norse gods now?" asked Pepper smugly from the passenger seat.

Anathema tried to ignore them, as she had been doing for the entire ride.

"Almost there!" she said brightly, with a gleam in her eye. Why, oh why had she agreed to take the Them in a car alone?

"Um, Anathema," Wensleydale pointed out, "we're still twenty minutes away."

Adam looked at Anathema's brittle smile and took pity on her. "No, we're not, Wensley," he said. "Seems to me like you need new glasses."

"I stand corrected," Wensleydale muttered, shooting Adam a look.

"Sit corrected," Brian pointed out.

Wensleydale gave Brian a severely aggrieved expression.

Brian looked at him a while and slowly and uncomfortably turned his head away.

Anathema ignored this and sighed with relief. Only half a minute, then, assuming Newt's Wasabi agreed to park this time (footnote: There had been a time when it had stolidly refused the only available spot in a crowded parking lot on the excuse that the car next to it was a Mercedes-Benz, and those were snobby. Newt had spent an hour arguing with it, getting steadily more crazed, until the Benz's owner had arrived, staring at him, and driven his car away.). The only problem was that the other car would still take fifteen to twenty minutes to arrive …

There was a _whoosh_ sound created by metal decelerating extremely quickly, and she glanced at the rearview mirror to see the Bentley. Newt, Jin Ah, and Charlotte all looked traumatized, and Aziraphale looked mildly nauseous. Crowley was grinning (footnote: Rather madly, one might say, if one didn't know any better.).

Ah, yes. Crowley had been driving. That would explain the speed. Also the fact that there appeared to be half a tree impaled in the side of the Bentley's front wheel.

"Is he expecting me to fix that for him again?" asked Adam bemusedly.

"No, I think he can handle it," said Anathema. "It's only metal and rubber, after all. If he had scratched the paint, that would have been different."

"Ah, I see," said Adam.

They had reached the cottage.

"Home sweet home!" Anathema said madly, stopping the Wasabi abruptly outside her house. She ran out of the car, and when Newt had gotten out of the Bentley she ran to him and threw her arms around his shoulders.

"I concur. You should have taken shotgun."

"The Them being chatty, were they?"

"Like you wouldn't believe."

Charlotte and Jin Ah had gotten out on the other side and were inspecting the front wheel with Crowley. Jin Ah looked horrified, yet intruiged, while Charlotte wore a slightly crazed smile. Aziraphale took one glance at it, gave Crowley a pointed look, and suddenly it was as if the injury had never afflicted the ancient wheel.

"Wow," the girls said together. Their powers were awesome.

Even more suddenly than it had gone, the storm came back again. It blew and howled and whistled, then it rained, and then the blue fire lit the sky in an instant, and then another came, too.

"This weather's mad!" exclaimed Brian.

"The flyin' man's still not here," said Adam.

They stood there in the rain for a moment, unsure of what to do. For some reason, the meeting couldn't kick off without the guy who flied.

Just then, Crowley's ears pricked. "Does.. anyone hear something?"

The others immediately started listening carefully.

"I think I hear something," said Jin Ah.

"Yeah, me too," said Charlotte.

A pause. The others couldn't hear a thing.

"It's kinda...high pitched," she continued.

Adam turned around, looked up, and saw something in the sky.

"There he is!" he shouted over the storm.

They all peered out, and saw a small dot that appeared to get larger and larger until they saw that it was actually a man, screaming for the fright of falling out of the sky.

Before they knew it, Ridley McCoy had landed right on top of the black Bentley, and slid off onto the ground and let out a long groan.

"Oh gosh, are you alright, Mr. McCoy?" asked Charlotte urgently.

After lying still for a moment, Ridley nodded rigidly, rolled onto his side and slowly stood up from there. He was sopping wet.

"No broken bones," he said quietly, "but next time, I'm riding with you guys."

_**Jin Ah: **AN: JUS CUZ WRE N DA STRY DUZNT MEEN WER MARTY SUUES!1! stop flmign gys!111 f I dnot gett fiv god rvews m gnna go ct ym wrsts cuz im so deprzed!1!  
... just kidding.  
Hello! I'm JinAh, and I'm co-writing this fanfic. Have you enjoyed it so far? Found something to critique? Want us to include something? Drop us a note! (hint, hint.) Because, while I pride myself on not being Tara Gilesbie, I would appreciate some reviews ^^._


	5. Chapter 4

_**Charlotte:** WARNING: Doctor Who parody coming up. YEAAAH. I love Doctor Who! And Jin Ah's never watched it before but she still knows everything about it because of TVTropes! Sooo. Oh, and the Death scene was very fun indeed, with plenty of delightful foreshadowing. We need to add more footnotes here, but that'll probably come later. BTW, we've edited the previous chapters quite a bit, so please feel free to look back at them and see what we've done. x) Happy reading! And please don't feel too shy to review!_

Chapter Four

Sophia Andromede Murphy was quite short, splendidly quirky, awesomely half-Greek, nineteen years old, and very clever - but most of all, she was an intern. She had come to England because she had heard it was one of the best places to get an education, and it was very exciting.1 And this had been true - Oxford had been excellent, and her internship certainly had been exciting. It had just been exciting in a rather stranger and more dangerous way than she had expected.2

"Sophie?" came a voice from the doorway. It was a light, distracted sort of voice, like a million things were going on in the mind that made it and only had the concentration to make a wispy sounding sort of word. Sophie looked up from her paperwork.

A head with a huge mop of incredibly tousled hair, and a large pair of goggles that obscured most of the face was sticking out from the inside of the other room. He had paused after calling her name, and was just looking at her, his mouth open a bit and his eyebrows furrowed, as if he had forgotten what he was going to say.

"...Yes, Dr. Fletcher?" Sophie finally asked.

"Oh, er, yeah!" he responded. "I need you to pull the switch. This is going to need more than two pairs of hands. Come on. And... oh yeah, put these on."

He threw her a pair of goggles and some yellow rubber gloves like his own. She quickly put them on as she strode into the Experiment Room.

It was a magnificent room, full of knobs and dials and test tubes and modules and wonderful, brilliant-looking machinery way ahead of its time. She had spent enough time here and learned enough about technology to know that most of these inventions were completely bonkers and pointless designed to look impressive, but it was pretty cool anyway. She wasn't even quite sure that the man who was operating these doodads was an actual doctor, either, but he seemed to be sure of what he was doing.

He looked like a doctor. A science-y kind of doctor that knows everything there is to know about physics and chemistry and botany and pedology and all the rest. He wore a burnt orange T-shirt, dark green corduroys, mismatching and brightly colored socks, checkered converse and, to top it off, a gleaming white lab coat. He was tall, skinny, and his dark hair went every which way and stuck up in highly improbable places. Right now, he had a slight smile on the part of his face that wasn't obscured by the dusty goggles. Sophie wondered if he could actually see through them. But the scientist was busy flipping, pushing and turning a dizzying array of switches, buttons and dials in the vast console that spread out before him.

"Alright, Sophie," he finally declared with a terribly mad grin. "Flip the switch!"

She grunted with the effort of reaching up, grabbing the handle and pushing down the large switch that took up an entire section of the wall. But as soon as it was turned over, there was a blinding flash of electric-blue light, the sound of buzzing bees, and a sensation that was rather like what you feel when you leave the earth's atmosphere for the first time. It was simply thrilling.

Sophie realized that she hadn't even really known what Dr. Fletcher was meaning to do. Oh well. She would find out soon enough.

Or - would she?

Sophie hadn't counted on three gray hooded shapes suddenly appearing in the lab. They talked amongst each other, ignoring her stare.

"Is this the machine he was building?" one asked.

"Yes! This is the … the abomination!" another hissed.

"It must be destroyed at once!" the third exclaimed.

At this point, Sophie felt like she should step in. She didn't think that Dr. Fletcher would be very happy about three cloaked hoodlums destroying his precious machine.

"Excuse me," she said, "but just who are you? And what do you think you're doing here? This is a research facility!"

It wasn't, technically, but 'research facility' sounded nice and grand and expensive - and no one liked having to pay for expensive things.

One of them turned to look at her - or at least, she assumed that they did, as she couldn't see their faces.

"Who is she?" The first one said.

"I don't know," the second one said. The other two immediately turned on it. "You said _I_!" They hissed. "You are not an individual! Individuals are finite, and thus must die!"

"Aaw-" the second one started to say, but it disappeared with a small puff.

Sophie blinked.

The two left turned on Sophie. "You have resulted in the loss of one of our number!" one snarled. "You will be destroyed along with this … horrible … device!"

"Sophie?" Dr. Fletcher walked in from the other room, looking dazed. His goggles were off, revealing a pair of electric green eyes. "Where are my - my goodness? Who are these people?"

He stared at the figures, and an expression crossed his face - one of faint recognition, the kind where you definitely remember something, but can't quite get a firm grip on _what_. Whatever Dr. Fletcher remembered, it was bad.

"Sophie!" he called. "Get out of here! Now!"

Sophie opened her mouth to say something, but Dr. Fletcher had grabbed her arm, and was pulling her through the door and out of the building. "Archie!" she managed to say. "The guinea pig! We can't leave him behind!"

Dr. Fletcher stopped, his expression chagrined, but what Sophie said was true - they couldn't leave Archie behind. "Wait right here," he said, and ran back inside. He emerged a moment later, holding a cage containing a terrified-looking black and white guinea pig, and just in time - not three seconds after he was out of the building, it … _changed_.

Where there had previously been a large building, a little dilapidated, a little shabby, brightly colored paint peeling severely but looking cozy all the same, was now another building - equally large, but much, much neater. It was a kind of industrial gray, and made of concrete. It was large, rectangular, blocky, and imposing. There was nothing cozy about it.

"What was _that_?" Sophie gasped.

"I'm not sure," said Dr. Fletcher grimly. "I'll go and see what's different on the inside."

He walked back into the building. Sophie thought that that was probably a very, very bad idea, but she followed him anyway, carefully carrying Archie's cage.

Inside, the machine was still there, but … different.

Dr. Fletcher was examining it, looking devastated. Occasionally, he would take out a ruler from his lab coat and measure things, then shake his head.

"What's wrong, Dr. Fletcher?" Sophie asked. The inside of the building was also a lot neater; there was none of the usual clutter, books were stacked neatly, but they were different books, too. Sophie pulled one of them out and opened it, only to see lines and lines of - binary?

"Doctor, come and look at this," she called out. She flipped through a couple more - they were all full of pages upon pages of ones and zeroes.

He walked over, looking like he was about to cry. "I don't know who they were or what they did," he said, "but they … they ruined everything," he said. "The machine doesn't work at all now. We might as well sell it for scrap. What's wrong with these books?"

He had caught sight of the book in Sophie's hand, along with the ones she had left open. "Numbers? Binary?"

"Could it be code? Or programming things? For computers, I mean - don't they run on binary?"

"I'm a scientist, not a computer programmer," said Dr. Fletcher, "but I don't think these are code. I think they're just … gibberish. Numbers. They're in a pattern, too - 10101010 and so on."

"What just happened?" asked Sophie, feeling weak. She slowly sank down and knelt on the floor. Archie squeaked in sympathy.

"I don't know," the doctor said. He shook his head. "I simply don't know what to make of all this … are any of the blueprints still here? Or our research?"

The two searched through the various papers now neatly stacked and/or filed throughout the large, cavernous room, but none of their original work had survived. Oh, they were blueprints and papers - but they all looked like they applied to the machine that was there now, not the one that they had been working on.

"Well," said Dr. Fletcher suddenly, his voice surprisingly cheerful, "I suppose we'll just have to start over, then."

"Start over?" gasped Sophie. They had been working on this for over a year!

"It doesn't look like there's anything we can do about it," he responded. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "I think we should tell my father about this. He's always interested in strange things."

He started toward the door. "Come along, Sophie," he said.

He walked straight out, and she followed unsure and bewildered in his wake.

Anathema looked around at the crowd of people around the kitchen people. Four children, four adults, and two teenagers were all looking very expectant, wondering what they were going to do.

"Now," said Anathema importantly, gaining all of their attention. "We need to sort all of this out. I've got the book here, but after the first four prophecies, it gets very strange and out of order (probably) and doesn't make very much sense any more."

"What are the first four prophecies?" asked Aziraphale curiously.

Anathema glanced at him, took out the book, opened it to the first page and started to read.

_I. Inne the Begynning of the Ende, the Onne fhalle flye to the Angell's layre._

_II. And the Two who do notte knowe what they are doing fhalle follow the Demone there._

_III. Watchers move about, axe in Hande; and the Tides of the Laft Days fhalle rife up and bring back the Olde Onnes to the fhore of the True Ende._

_IV. And there is alfo Another Onne who fhalle be Watched, and a heralde of the Impoffible Things throng him alwayf._

She stopped.

"What comes after that?" asked Charlotte.

_V. A Toadde watches at the Gayte – Beware!_

"Oh."

There was a moment of contemplative yet awkward silence.

"I like toads," said Brian. The other Them nodded. They were fun to play with.

"Maybe it's a horned toad," said Wensleydale. "They're supposed to be pretty scary."

All the kids nodded.

"My dad played with horned toads when he was little," Charlotte said. "He lived in a lot of different places around the world, and in one of them there were a lot of horned toads. He said they looked more like spiny lizards, and when you really aggravated them they would shoot blood out of their eyes." She ended this with strangely mixed feelings of distaste and amusement. Jin Ah shivered at the thought. It certainly would freak out predators... and people, for that matter.

Adam was looking at Charlotte with fascination. And so it was that horned toads were completely awesome.

"But what does all of this mean, Anathema?" asked Newt, who knew they must mean _something_. "It doesn't really all make that much sense."

"Well, a few of these have already happened."

All of them stared at her.

"...Er -" started Crowley.

"Oh, come on, the first one isn't that difficult, is it?" asked Anathema, who had been deciphering her ancestor's prophecies her entire life and had a bit of difficulty understanding why none of the others could.

"_Inne the Beginninge of the End, the Onne fhalle fly to the Angell's layre._That's obviously saying that Ridley, 'the Onne', flew to Aziraphale's bookshop. Nothing tricky there."

The others nodded. A few of them had already figured this one out.

"And, _The Two who do notte knowe what they are doing_, that's obviously Charlotte and Jin Ah," continued Anathema. "And they followed Crowley to Aziraphale's bookshop as well, so that's exactly what happened.

"And the third one -"

"That's where I got confused," cut in Pepper.

"Yes, well, it says that _The Watchers move about, axe in Hande_. That's not hard, either."

"Why?" asked Brian.

"Because these... Auditors came into my shop and chopped my head off with an axe," Aziraphale answered, that same bitterness coming back into his voice.

"THEY CHOPPED YOUR HEAD OFF?" the Them all shrieked, part in wonder and part in delight.

"It was quite strange," said Jin Ah.

"You got to see it off?" said Adam enviously.

Ridley, who had been quietly bewildered in all of this conversation, decided that he had to speak up here.

"Wait, you mean that your head had actually been taken off by those grey cloaked things? Why didn't I know any of this?"

"My head had just been put back on again right before you came in," said Aziraphale tiredly.

"How did you get it back on?" asked Pepper.

"I'm an angel, dear girl, surely it's not hard to gather how it was done."

"Why are they called the Watchers?" asked Charlotte, remembering the frightening wispy things that she had seen through the dusty bookshop windows.

"Because they watch everything," said Crowley. "They're called ... the Auditors of the Universe. And like most auditors, the Auditors like everything neat and tidy. We don't know too much else about them."

"They said that they were after Ridley," said Aziraphale.

"They WHAT?" That was Ridley, of course.

"They were after you," repeated Aziraphale. "And we don't know why, so don't ask."

Ridley's mouth opened and closed, and kept doing so for quite a while. He was simply at a loss with himself. Too much was happening in so little time. Why had he so foolishly obeyed Agnes Nutter?

"What about the last one?" asked Crowley. "There's another One?"

"I suppose," said Anathema. "This one is certainly very enigmatic, but it at least seems like it's connected with the others. I suspect that we shall meet this other one eventually.

"But there's one overlying theme in here that we cannot ignore," Anathema continued grimly. "The Ende. It is nigh. And this is only the Begynninge."

All of them took this in gloomily, looking at the fingers in their laps.

Except Charlotte, though, who just gave a little smile.

Death was pacing in his study quietly, thinking, pondering and wondering as only Death could do. A small tabby kitten followed at his heels, and an old, hunched over man watched him curiously.

SOMETHING IS STARTING TO HAPPEN ON THE ROUNDWORLD, he said finally.

"The Roundworld? Bloody annoying place, if you ask me," said the old man, Albert, his manservant. "No proper magic to speak of. What are they up to now? More quantum?"

SOMETHING FROM SOME TIME AGO.

"Yes, sir?"

NOT TOO LONG AGO, BUT IT IS COMING BACK. THE AUDITORS ARE ABOUT. I THINK THEY HAVE FOUND THEM.

"And who would this 'them' be?"

THEY ARE...

It took a moment for Death to think of a way to describe them. He knew which word to use, but it seemed too crude for the circumstances. He used it anyway.

...THE IMPOSSIBLE HUMANS. THEY WERE BORN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO ON THE ROUNDWORLD. THE WIZARD RINCEWIND IS WATCHING OVER ONE OF THEM.

"And the other one?"

WE DON'T KNOW WHERE HE IS. HE WAS LOST. BUT I HAVE A FEELING THAT THAT WILL NOT BE STOPPING THE AUDITORS.

"Ah. Yes."

Death stood still for a while, seeming to be thinking some more.

"And what are we going to do about it?" asked Albert gloomily. He felt sure that whatever it was, it wouldn't be pleasant. For him, at least.

WAIT, FOR NOW. THERE IS NOTHING MUCH THAT WE CAN DO AT THE MOMENT. WE SHALL PLAY OUR PART WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.

"Oh. Alright then."

AN END IS NIGH, ALBERT. A GREAT END. AND YOU KNOW THAT I AM RATHER FOND OF ENDINGS. I SIMPLY DO NOT WANT THIS TO END THE WRONG WAY.

"Of course, sir."

Death gently picked up the mewing kitten, sat down in his grand chair, and started stroking it softly with his bony fingers, still thinking silent thoughts.

_**Jin Ah: **__And finally, we figure out how to do footnotes on google docs. To paraphrase one of my friends, JinAh learns how to technology 2011!  
I'm also very pleased that we introduced Death, Dr. Fletcher, and Sophie in this one, as Sophie and Dr. Fletcher are cool and Death is ... Death._

1She had to admit that this was probably especially true compared to her hometown, a tiny village with a population of seventy-six - no, seventy-seven, and that included the neighborhood goat. Hey, the neighborhood goat was important, okay?

2It was dangerous in and that they weren't sure whether their experiment would or wouldn't damage the nature of space-time. It was that kind of exciting.


	6. Chapter 5

_**Charlotte: **FINALLY WE MEET THE DISCWORLD! Yesssss. T_T I need to read more Discworld, I love it dearly. Anyway, Jin Ah's very good at writing about the wizards at Unseen University, everything's beautifully in character and it's AWESOME. x) We've also got brief theological discussion, if you're interested in that kind of thing. No shortage of footnotes this chapter! Please enjoy~_

Chapter Five

"Right through here," Dr. Fletcher said, leading Sophie up a path covered with tangled vines and, now, melting heaps of snow. As could probably be expected, Dr. Fletcher's house was, well, messy. There was no other way of putting it. Vines snaked the lawn that, rather than grass, was mostly made up of tall, spiny weeds, dandelions and thistles. The porch was covered with a good amount of dirt and leaves left over from fall, and it was rather damp. The house itself seemed to be painted a singular shade of green... or purple in some places. Or orange. It depended on how far worn the paint was on a particular spot of the house. It had one story, a dark blue tile roof and a gray door, with cobwebs strewn in corners filled with spider eggsacs. It made Sophie want to grab a broom and sweep it up, maybe trim the various overgrown plants, give the house another coat of paint.

Of course, none of that was logical thought. She had just seen an entire warehouse be transformed into something it almost certainly hadn't been before, at all, and thus, she was probably just in shock and was thinking silly and ridiculous thoughts so she wouldn't have to deal with what had actually happened.1

Dr. Fletcher seemed a bit down, too. He wasn't whistling, as he usually did, and he seemed even more absent-minded than usual, as if he was thinking about something puzzling.

They had reached the door, and Dr. Fletcher was fishing around in his pocket for a key. "Hold this for a second, will you?" he asked Sophie, handing her a rubber chicken. Sophie took it curiously, wondering what he needed a rubber chicken for, but not for too long. She was sure he was quite capable of doing marvelous things with rubber chickens.

Beside her, Archie squeaked.

"I don't know what's going on either, Archie," she told him, then immediately felt silly for talking to a guinea pig. Archie squeaked again, as if to tell her that it was quite all right. That made it worse.

Finally, Dr. Fletcher seemed to have found what he was looking for; he pulled a large ring bristling with keys out of one of the numerous pockets of his floor-length lab coat, and started unlocking the door. Sophie noticed that there were locks going from the top of the door to the bottom, and they all looked ridiculously mismatched - bluing coppery ones here, a new-looking titanium one there. One of them was a combination lock, for which he took a very long piece of paper covered in many different combinations from his shoe. Sophie was a bit surprised as it wasn't folded or anything, he just took the end of it from his heel and it came out smoothly like a tape dispenser. It went back in like a tape measure. Dr. Fletcher eventually made his way down to the bottom, squatting on his checkered converse, the squares peeking out at her from beneath his lab coat. Sophie realized that she had no idea what he wore other than his lab coat - she had never seen him in anything else.2

He undid the final lock , and the door creaked inward. There was no handle - that was odd. He gestured for Sophie to come in, and she did, carefully carrying Archie's case. Inside the house was a mess equal to - or possibly greater than - the one on the outside. Dr. Fletcher hung the key ring on a nail by the door, locked the various locks, and took off his lab coat. He hung it on another nail, and pulled on another floor-length coat, this one brown. Of course. Another coat.3

"Rincewind," he called. There was an answering crash and a muffled shout that sounded like, "Oh, in Offler's name!" and Sophie heard someone shuffling towards them.

Sophie had never heard that curse before. She wondered (it was turning into a hobby) who Offler was. Actually, Dr. Fletcher didn't know, either, but he had never bothered to ask because he had heard it ever since he was a child and was quite used to it.

An old man shambled in - no, he wasn't old, Sophie realized, just (like the house) rather messy, and nearly hidden by the large, fuzzy bathrobe he was wearing. He looked like he needed some sleep.

"Nicholas?" he said. "Who is this?" he peered appraisingly at Sophie. "She looks like she could use some food," he said critically. "Did you make her in your lab?"

"What?" said Sophie. "No. I work with Dr. Fletcher, I'm his assistant. Pleased to meet you." She extended her hand.

He took it gingerly. "And what brings you here?" he asked. There was a series of small patting sounds, and Sophie saw what looked like a … many legged suitcase? walking towards them.

The bathrobed man noticed her gaze. "Ah, yes," he said. "That's just the Luggage, don't mind it. Bloody annoying, it can be sometimes, but it can fit a really incredible amount of things inside it, and it's good in case we get burgled."

Sophie had no idea what he meant, but she nodded politely. Was it some sort of robot? It seemed less and less likely as she looked at it more cloesly and watched its toes wiggle.

Dr. Fletcher cleared his throat. "Sophie, this is my father - well, adoptive father, Rincewind," he said. "Rincewind, this is Sophie. She's my assistant, as she has already made clear. She's a student."

"A student?" Rincewind said suspiciously. He didn't seem to like the idea, and looked doubtful.

Sophie was even more doubtful about this man's name. What kind of a name was Rincewind, really? It sounded like a kind of cheese.

"Yes," Dr. Fletcher said. He ran his fingers through his hair, distracted. "There's something we need to tell you about. You see, there were these strange gray hooded people at the lab, and they messed up the experiment somehow-" he broke off, noticing the horror in Rincewind's eyes. "Are you all right?"

Rincewind was groaning, looking as though he was going to be sick. "Ohhhh nooooooooooooo," he moaned. "Aaaaaaarghhhhh..."

"What's wrong?"

"Not the _Auditors_..."

Sophie felt gratified to see that Dr. Fletcher looked just as confused as she was. "The who?"

"The…... You know," said Rincewind, now grinning slightly manically, "this is beyond me. Someone needs to explain this to you, and _I'm_ not going to do it. Wait here."

He shuffled back down the hallway, muttering under his breath, "They said that it would be great here. Nothing more to run from, no cosmic horrors to ruin my life, eh? And I believed them! How could I have been so foolish? I should have known …"

Soon, Rincewind had disappeared altogether and Dr. Fletcher and Sophie were left to wait for... whatever it was they were waiting for. Sophie looked over at her boss expectantly, thinking that he would have at least some better understanding of the situation than she did. Dr. Fletcher happened to glance at her staring at him, and immediately became fidgety.

"What?"

"Well she's obviously quite confused about what kind of lifestyle you lead, Dr. Fletcher," said a tiny little voice, and the two jumped.

"What was that?" asked the doctor, turning his head every which way.

"Right here, you silly humans, I've been here the entire time."

The two pairs of eyes slowly turned to look at the little black and white gerbil in the cage Sophie was holding.

"Finally, you're paying me some attention. You must know that I've been every bit as worried as the two of you."

"You're... talking..." said Sophie, wide-eyed.

Archie gave a tiny chuckle, "Heh, humans, always stating the obvious."

Dr. Fletcher just looked at it interestedly. Really, the strangest things seemed to happen at his house.

"How come you weren't talking before?" asked Sophie, still a bit taken aback.

"What do you mean? I've always been talking. All I know is you're starting to answer me for once."

"You... er..." Sophie couldn't think of anything to say. She went default. "Hello."

"Good afternoon," said Archie.4 "But goodness me, how long have you lived in this place, Dr. Fletcher?"

The doctor shrugged. "My whole life, really. Or as far as I can remember. I was only six months old when Rincewind took me in."

"No wonder you create a mess everywhere you go. You leave my cage looking like a pig sty every time you come to feed me. But no matter. I wonder just who Rincewind expects to find in that hallway. Does anyone else live with you, Dr. Fletcher?"

"No. I'm just as confused as you."

"Hm..." said Archie in his strange little voice, "you don't seem to know a whole lot about the situation for being an integral part of it, do you, Dr. Fletcher?"

Dr. Fletcher considered this and wondered just who his father was.

Sophie still couldn't believe she had heard her guinea pig say the word _integral_.

"Ook?"

It was impossible to spend any length of time at Unseen University and not be aware of the myriad meanings of the word "ook".5 It could mean "Put the banana down and walk away slowly," for example, or, "I see you have a large hippo on your head," or, "Archchancellor, The Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography would like to talk to you." On this particular occasion, the third meaning was, in fact, what the Librarian meant, and the Archchancellor understood him at once, much to his dismay.

"Rincewind? What's he want _now_? Earth too much of a bother for him?"

"Ook."

"Really? Well, send him in, then."

By 'send him in,' the Archchancellor did not literally mean, send him in. Instead, the Librarian brought in a large glass bowl, filled with water.

"Water?" Mustrum Ridcully said critically. "I thought we'd left that behind in the Dribbly-Candle Era. This is the Century of the Fruitbat! We can't-"

"Ook."

"Well, the Century of the Anchovy, then, but you know what I mean. We have proper scrying glasses now, with actual glass. Go talk to Young Stibbons and ask him to give you one."

Ponder Stibbons happened to be walking by the room at the time,6 and, hearing his name, walked in. "Yes, Archchancellor?"

"Ah, Young Stibbons. Give the Librarian a proper looking glass, will you? It's a complete disgrace, this kind of thing! This is the kind of scrying glass our grandfathers would have used! If our grandfathers had been wizards, I mean. But look, Young Stibbons-"

Rincewind, who had been rather uncharacteristically quiet until now, felt like he should speak up.

"Er, Archchancellor Ridcully," he started to say.

"Yes?" said Ridcully, who seemed to have forgotten all about him. "What do you want, Rincewind?"

"You see, sir," said Rincewind, "er, about what you said? Before? About how Earth would be all fine and wonderful, and I wouldn't have to do any running or fighting, and how everything was going to be peaches and cheese for me from now on?"

"I do believe the term is peaches and _cream_," Ponder broke in, but Ridcully waved at him to be quiet.

"Yes? And?"

"And you remember how you promised that if it wasn't," and here Rincewind had a rather maniacal gleam in his eye, "that I could come back, and you would give me whatever office I wanted?"

"Yes," said Ridcully, beginning to feel slightly nervous, "except mine. I specifically said that, didn't I?"

"No, Archchancellor, you did not, in fact."

"I'm sure I did. I'm sure."

"Well, you didn't. That's not important right now, though."

"What do you mean not important, Rincewind? It's my office! It's not like-"

"What is IMPORTANT, Archchancellor, is that my son - well - not my son, but you know, the boy - has just been attacked by Auditors! Here! On the Roundworld! What am I supposed to do?"

Ridcully, who had once more started occupying himself with the fruit trolley, had not really been paying attention to the last part of Rincewind's speech, so he said, "Well, I'm sure you can handle it, you'll do fine, you know, you've been doing a great job as it is-" and then the small part of his brain that had been screaming at him for the last few seconds managed to make itself heard to the rest of his brain. "Rincewind - did you say - _Auditors_?"

"Yes!"

Ponder Stibbons groaned.

The Librarian went "Ook..."

Ridcully did not move.

A few moments later, his expression blank, he said, "Well, we should probably go and see what's going on, then."

"Yes! Yes! You definitely should!"

"And I think, in return for us saving your life, I should get to keep my office."

"Oh, all right. I get the Dean's former office, then!"

Rincewind immediately regretted mentioning the Dean, but the damage was done.

"The DEAN'S OFFICE? THE TRAITOR'S LAIR? YOU WOULD-"

Ponder Stibbons whispered hurriedly in Ridcully's ear, and his fury subsided.

"Oh, yes, I forgot." Smiling reminiscently, he said, "We had a football match against them last week, you know. Lovely match. We beat them forty-two to nothing. Splendid fight."

Rincewind kept quiet.

"Yes, you can have the Dean's office if you can come back in any state to do so. Stibbons!"

"Yes, Archchancellor?"

"Go and tell the other wizards to stop stuffing their faces or sleeping or whatever it is they're doing and get ready. We are going to the Roundworld. Oh, and ask Mrs. Whitlow to pack a lunch for us - you know what Roundworld food is like."

"Very well, sir," said Ponder, his mind running through calculations on how long it would take the University's various staff to collect their things and their state of mind, and how much it would cost for them to bring enough food to satisfy even the wizards' gluttonous appetites.

"Are the bledlows coming too, sir?"

"No. Definitely not. This is a trip for wizards only."

"So no students, then?"

"Well … actually, yes, some students."

"They could die!"

"And the ones that won't will make excellent wizards. Oh, don't look so horrified, Young Stibbons, that's how wizardry worked in my day. Before my day. It still _is_ my day, after all."

Ponder felt rather more annoyed at being called Young Stibbons than he was horrified at the thought of dead students, but he didn't let it show on his face.

"Very well, then, we should be able to leave tonight-"

"Tonight? Are you insane, Stibbons? Five minutes, at the most!"

Ponder sighed. Five minutes, to coordinate the gelatinous, childlike masses that were the Unseen University's staff. Of course, all the hard work had to fall to him.

Like always.

"Urgh! Will, you little toad!" Genevieve shouted at her annoying younger brother. He had been poking her incessantly for the last half hour and it was driving her mad. No, seriously, it was driving her absolutely stark-raving, mouth-foaming, teeth-grinding, round-the-twist bonkers. She ran out of the room and came back with a baseball bat.

"If you poke me one more time, know that I'm armed."

The little boy giggled, but he didn't poke her anymore.

Jayha had been sitting on Genevieve's bed, playing his video games on his Nintendo DS. "Look, Will, look where I've got to!" And the young admiring boy jumped up to see what he was doing.

"Oh, wow!" said Will.

All three kids, from youngest to oldest, were three years apart in age. Genevieve, obviously the oldest because she was the most annoyed, had dark gold hair that was wavy around her shoulders, hazel eyes, and a pretty, even dark complexion, quite differing from her sister's paleness and constantly flushed cheeks. She was probably the most photogenic person Charlotte knew.7 Jayha was quite a pretty child as well, with a head full of thick black hair, a playful, healthy tan and a face that still managed to keep the adorable quality of when he was four. William, or more often Will, was just a little monkey. He had dark hair that constantly needed cutting, ears that stuck out too far in a very cute way, eyelashes that most women would give their first-born children for,8 and the most beautiful deep brown eyes that any child should ever be allowed to have. So they were all unfairly beautiful children, perfect to hide the devious little minds inside them.

Well, sort of. Will had his adorable moments, and he didn't plot against anybody or anything. He just, as demonstrated here, loved to annoy his big sisters, and was good at it. He especially loved annoying Genevieve, because she reacted the most. Then there was Jayha, who generally stayed on the quiet side, then somehow managed to help the other two break something that the salesman had _assured_ them was unbreakable. But it was Genevieve who got them all to work together and pull pranks and things. She wasn't _truly_ devious, either, but she _was_ the kind of sister who, when you invited your friends over to your house for the first time, would cheerfully say to them, "Hi, I'm Genevieve, Charlotte's evil little sister!" Yeah, she had her good moments. But she did threaten her baby brother with a baseball bat.

And right now, Genevieve wasn't in a very good mood. The Them were all supposed to have come to her house by now. That was why Jayha (who lived a few blocks away) was there. It was very annoying only to have her sister's best friend's little brother there to talk to and her own brother to constantly pick on her while she waited, and she wondered what in the world could be holding them up. They hadn't ever been two hours late before. She would have called them, but she didn't know Anathema's cell phone number. She didn't even know if Anathema had a cell phone.

Still, it was only a matter of time. They'd have to show up sooner or later, even if it was next week, and then they'd have some explaining to do.

William was starting to pick on her again.

"Will, go and wait at the front door and tell me when you see a weird green car, okay?"

"Okay!" he said dutifully, and ran off for the front door. Genevieve settled down to watch Jayha play his video game.

Surprisingly, only a few minutes passed before William came in on top of his other sister's back, covering her eyes for good measure. Charlotte just sighed.

"Beware the Toad," she mumbled, and suddenly a little bit of the world made sense again.

It wasn't only Charlotte and Will who had come in at that moment, but also Jin Ah, Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale, Brian, Anathema, who had twigs and leaves in her hair, Aziraphale, Crowley, and a dazed-looking Ridley. Newt wasn't there because he was still trying to get the Wasabi to park.9

"Finally, you're here!" Genevieve sighed. Then she stopped and looked at all the people and you could tell she was already thoroughly weirded out. "Uh..."

"What's wrong, Gen?" asked Adam.

"Who are you three?" Genevieve pointed at the angel, the devil, and the flying guy.

"That's our English teacher," chirped Charlotte.

"Him?" she asked.

"That's the one!"

"Er, hi," he said.

"Yeah hi. What about the other two?"

"Yes, hello, dear girl. I'm Aziraphale." He nudged Crowley in the ribs.

"Oh, er, I'm Crowley.

"...Did your mother give you that name?"

"No, actually, I gave it to myself."10

"No, I was talking to this bloke," continued Genevieve, pointing at the angel. "...I gotta say, that's an unusual one."

"Yes, well, er," Aziraphale was actually strangely speechless. He'd never actually given that much thought to his name's credibility. He'd have had to face reality sooner or later, he supposed.

"You could use... A. Z. Raphael. That would be plausible," offered Charlotte, inferring a bit of what he was thinking.

"Ah. And what would the 'A. Z.' stand for?"

Charlotte gave a little smile. "Abel Zacharias."

"Very amusing," came the sarcastic reply, and Jin Ah smiled as well.

Genevieve and Jayha looked at them quizzically.

"Remind me why we've come here," said Ridley tiredly.

"Today's Saturday. In all the excitement, we'd almost forgotten our Saturday camps at Genevieve's."

"Ah. And this is more important, is it?"

"What else are we supposed to do?" argued Adam. "We might as well go on as normal until something happens."

Charlotte was looking at her little sister's increasingly confused face with concern.

"Er, guys - "

"What in the world are all of you talking about?" blurted Genevieve.

"Er, well..."

"I demand explanations right now!" she said.

They all groaned inwardly. It was quite a long story to tell...

So, they were _almost_ relieved to hear the strange voices coming down the hallway.

"_We come... We come for the one... The one who defies us!"_

Just one thing to note: Mr. and Mrs. Poe weren't home. Mr. Poe was at work because he needed to feed his cells11 and Mrs. Poe was grocery shopping.

So good, no inconvenient parents hanging about.

But still. Little brothers and a sister who knew nothing.

Soon enough, there were those strange cloaked figures, floating in the doorway.

"What are they?" Genevieve asked weakly.

"Watchers," said Charlotte.

But they were trapped in the room, there was nowhere to go.

"Any blue cheese on you, Crowley?" asked Aziraphale, but it was futile.

They were advancing, right towards a cowering Ridley, wondering what they were going to do...

_Crash, bang. Stumble, shout, irritation_. Something else had come in right through the door.

_**Jin Ah: **__Aaaaand the Wizards make their first appearance! Gosh, that was fun to write. Poor Rincewind gets dragged out of what he thought was a nice, easy retirement. And we get deeper into the mystery of who Dr. Fletcher really is ..._

1The human mind is good at that. It gives you lots of useless things to worry about, so you won't spend time worrying about things like how many bacteria you've ingested that day.

2The answer is, of course, a trench coat.

3YEAH.

4If he had eyebrows, one of them would be crooked.

5 If you did not, the Librarian would quickly enlighten you. It was doubly simple for him to do this, seeing as not only did he spend most of his time in a magical library, but he was also an orangutan. He didn't mind being an orangutan much, as it meant that he could have all the bananas he wanted, and was the best goalie the Academicals had ever had - not a single ball could get past him.

6The Archchancellor was not sitting in his office, but in a much larger room. While it did not have many of the comforts of his office (i.e., a comfortable chair), that was made up for by the fact that it did have food. The only surprising part was that there weren't more wizards in there. Wizards are partial to food, as it keeps them alive and sane. Never keep a wizard away from his breakfast. Or second breakfast, in fact, or elevensies, for that matter.

7 Despite all these differences, people still insisted that they looked nearly like twins. Neither of them recognized any resemblance.

8 Charlotte's mother included.

9She had been trying to help Newt to park the Wasabi under a tree which seemed to have taken a strong dislike to cars, as it had branches poking out in directions sure to impale anyone who went near any car daring to park underneath its supreme leafy majesty. The tree and the Wasabi had fought a grand battle, with the tree losing many branches and the Wasabi gaining many scratches, resulting in a guarded draw between the two foes and Newt, as he often did, coming out as the loser.

10He'd never regretted a moment of it, either; Crowley was infinitely cooler than _Crawley_.

11 Mr. Poe was a microbiology researcher. This meant that he had that job where you tried to find cures diseases. It also meant that he tested on cells and cloned DNA and wore a lab coat and stuff. Charlotte thought this was infinitely awesome.


	7. Chapter 6

_**Charlotte:** I hope you will enjoy reading about our beloved Village Idiots, who were actually taken from our Screnzy last year. They're quite enjoyable to read about. We've also got Norse gods! Woo! Has anybody here read Douglas Adams' The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul? He's another one of our favorites...Also, you should probably read up a little on your Norse mythology first if you want to get a lot of the jokes in that scene, Jin Ah didn't get most of them until after doing that, unfortunately. Anyways, please do enjoy!_

Chapter Six

It was hard to tell at first what had happened: all that was visible was a swirling mass of dusty cloth, what appeared to be hair, and above everything the sound of arguing.

The mass slowly settled into figures. One of them seemed to be waving its hands frantically.

"No, Archchancellor!" it said. "I explained this! This is the Roundworld, remember? You can't do things like that here, people will-"

At this point, he looked behind him to where the children, the adults, the angel, and the demon were staring at him.

"-notice."

"You're not the only one who has been to the Roundworld, you know, Young Stibbons," said another - rather rotund - figure, who was brushing dust off of its robes. "I must say I'm surprised Mustrum lets you act like this, it's flagrant disrespect towards authority. I know I'd never let Turnipseed …" he droned as behind him, various figures struggled to get up from where they had collapsed in a knotted, writhing pile on the floor.

"Argh! Get your knee out of my face, Runes!"

"I'll get my knee out of your face as soon as the Senior Wrangler stops pushing it forward with his stomach!"

"My stomach? It's practically a - a _biscuit_ compared to the jelly donut that's your own stomach, ha-"

"Twelve ounces make the yard! Biscuit jelly fills the sea!"

"I say, Bursar, that was nearly relevant."

"_What's that you said about my stomach?_"

"Well, even your blind old mother would have to say -"

"_You leave my mother out of this!_"

"That's one of the reasons I left Unseen University, you know," the fattest figure was continuing, oblivious to the chaos right behind him, as the first figure rubbed his temples and another one watched the entire scene with an expression of annoyed amusement. The humans, antichrist, demon, and angel, were all staring with expressions of complete bewilderment.

The auditors, meanwhile, were being ignored - something that did not suit them. "Humans!" it hissed. "Organic creatures!"

The tallest figure looked up and seemed to see them for the first time. "Ah, yes," it said, a smile breaking over its face.

The first figure, the one with glasses, looked up as well. "Archchancellor!" he said urgently. "Those are very dangerous, you shouldn't."

"Be quiet, Stibbons," the other replied. "The hunter is always quiet, so as to not alert the prey to his presence."

"_But they already know we're here!_"

"Really? Well, then the next step is to apply swift and brutal force."

Before anyone could blink, a grin had spread over his face, and he picked up the worn length of wood he held in his hand and pointed it at the Auditors.

"Lovely to see you again," he said, and blasted them with a jet of greenish-purple flames.

"NO WAY!" screamed Pepper, and Jin Ah and Charlotte got excited little tingling feelings inside their stomachs.

"Archchancellor!" the be-glassed one fairly shrieked. "Such a huge discharge of magical energy is highly unadvisable and-"

The figure who seemed to be the Archchancellor waved a hand vaguely in his direction. "WELL, clearly no harm done, eh, Stibbons? And who do we have here!"

Aziraphale felt that, as an angel, he should step in here and restore a sense of civility and order.

"Wonderful to meet you," he said. "My name is Aziraphale, and I am an angel." He extended his hand to the Archchancellor, and immediately regretted it. The man's grip was like getting his hand stuck between Crowley's sofa cushions, which knew better than to leave any spaces for Crowley to accidentally lose his change in and end up blowing up the sofa to try and find it.1

"Splendid! Archchancellor Ridcully, of Unseen University! It's been quite a while since I saw an angel, although I must say they're usually rather prettier! And this," he said, pulling over the man in glasses, who looked dreadfully unhappy, "is Ponder Stibbons! Say hello, young Stibbons!"

Aziraphale had been rather affronted by the insult to his (he considered, rather considerable, even if he did say so himself) beauty, but managed to pull together his politeness enough to gingerly stick out his hand again. He was relieved to see that Ponder (what an odd name) did not have nearly as strong a grip.

"And these," the Archchancellor said, gesturing broadly at the mess behind him, "are the rest of the faculty! Along with a few students, of course." The knot of people seemed to realize that they were being discussed, and straightened up, brushing off their clothes and, in a few cases, their beards.

"The Lecturer in Recent Runes, at your service-"

"Chair of Indefinite Studies, pleased to make your acquaintance-"

"The Senior Wrangler, er, miss, I'd be quite pleased if you call me Horace, actually-"

"Ook."

"That's the librarian-"

"Trees. Bunnies hopping! Hopping _everywhere_!"

"And that's the Bursar - er - did anyone bring any dried frog pills, by any chance?"

"Yes, I've got some here-"

"I'm Rincewind," said another unhappily.

"Stanley Blixer, student -"

"Murgatroyd Hooper, for my sins-"

"And that thing's Rincewind's luggage, we don't talk about it."

"Ahem," said another, very fat figure. "Pleased to meet you," he said sanctimoniously. "I am the _**A**_rchchancellor..." (he shot a look at Archchancellor Ridcully at this point, and seemed pleased to see that the latter wasn't paying any attention to him, and was instead examining a few pictures on the mantlepiece) "... of Brazeneck College."

"Here now, Stibbons," said Archchancellor Ridcully, "They've got a picture of the Disc! I mean, it's got a few extra elephants and the wossname, perspective's a little off, but ..." He waved his hand at a picture of the world being carried by eight elephants on the back of a turtle.

"Ah, yes," said Charlotte, who felt that here was finally something that she could explain. "That's actually based on Hindu mythology. You see, they thought that the world was carried on the backs of several giant elephants on the back of a giant turtle, which, I mean, is fairly ridiculous, since it's clearly impossible …" she trailed off, realizing that her guests were looking even more confused before.

"What do you mean, _impossible_?"

"Ah," said Ponder Stibbons. "I think I should step in at this point."

Charlotte and Jin Ah watched him, having the sneaking suspicion that he was about to explain the truth of even more wonders that day. It was too cool, being proved wrong again and again.

He did.

"You did _what_?" asked Anathema faintly. She seemed to be wavering between states of shocked enlightenment and complete skepticism.

The Antichrist looked at the poster quietly. He didn't think _he'd_ called that into existence.

"We split the thaum," said Ponder in the voice of someone used to explaining things to people (but not necessarily to having them actually _listen_).

"Which is..."

"The smallest particle of energy. You see, it created a massive amount of energy-"

"Like the atom in our world," broke in Wensleydale.

"They're probably the same thing," said Crowley.

"Oh, I very much doubt that," said Ponder smoothly. Crowley didn't enjoy being corrected, but Ponder was clearly used to correcting people who didn't enjoy being corrected, and he plowed on. "You see, it seemed like such a waste to just dump all that magic somewhere, and it would be a wonderful exercise for Hex, and, well … I mean, you're not _upset_ about it, are you?"

"Why would we be upset?" asked Pepper.

"I'm a bit upset," said Aziraphale. He looked a little odd. "I'm sure that's not how it happened. I mean. I was _there_. Well, not there quite _then_, but not long afterwards, and I've talked to people, and, well-" he looked a bit flustered.

"Here," said the Archchancellor. "Stibbons here isn't explaining it properly. We have a story about your creation. Is it true? Yes. You have another story. Is it true? Yes. They're both true."

"I don't see how that's-"

"That's because you're confined to one perception of possibility," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, shortly.

"Which," said Ponder, "I think, would be a good segue into why we're here."

"Why _are_ you here?" spoke up Ridley for the first time. While they had all been talking, he'd been slowly developing another headache and wondering more and more why all of this must be happening to him. It's a good thing he did speak up, as everyone was just about forgetting that he was there. Again.

"Did it have something to do with those Auditor things?" asked Adam.

They all nodded. Absolutely, indeed, yes, that was quite the answer.

"How did you know they were over here?" asked Ridley.

They all pointed to Rincewind, who gave a wry smile and started explaining some things.

In the meantime, Stanley Blixer had noticed something shiny.

"What _is_ that?" he asked. They were outside, and they were looking at the Poe's purple car with supreme interest. It was a Ford, at least twenty-five years old, and seemed immortal.

"It has wheels," noticed Murgatroyd. "It must be some kind of cart."

"But it's so … shiny," said Stanley distastefully. "I mean, even Dibbler wouldn't push around a cart like that -"

They looked at it.

"Okay, maybe he might. But," said Stanley, pushing it a little, "it's too heavy to be a cart."

Murgatroyd looked inside curiously. "There's something there in front of that seat."

Stanley looked at it with him and saw the circular disk... thingy. "There is."

Some neighbors were starting to notice the two strange men watching the car, but the student wizards didn't notice them back.

Stanley's curiosity got the better of him and he hopped around to the other side of the car, eventually figured out how to open the door, and sat in the front seat. Murgatryod shrugged and took shotgun.

Stanley was one of those stick-thin wiry people, and he had wiry red hair to go with it. It was a bit unruly and uncut, but that was delinquents for you. His (very bad) teeth sometimes seemed to poke out, and his eyes boggled blue. Murgatroyd was floating on the line between looking extremely abnormal and being one of those people you wouldn't recognize even if they were your mother. That is to say, his individual features were incredibly plain and ordinary, but the combination of the whole made your eyes water if you looked at it too wrong. It was as if there was something fundamentally wrong with his face. Of course, there was something fundamentally wrong with Stanley's eyes, and he never minded looking at Murgatroyd (although even he got headaches afterwards sometimes), and so the two had struck up an odd friendship.

"Maybe it's a sort of chair," suggested Murgatroyd. "So people can sit in it and Enjoy Nature while at the same time avoiding nasty things like rain, wind, or animals."

"Well of course it's a chair," sniffed Stanley. "The question is, what is _this_ thing?" He put two hands on the wheel curiously, tried to heft it, found that it didn't come off, tried turning it and found that it gave a little.

"Oh, I know!" said Murgatroyd, a bit excited now. "It's like the wheel of a ship! You turn that wheel right, and the ship goes left and vice versa."

"How come it isn't moving, then?"

You can probably guess that all of this ended up rather badly. They figured out how to turn it on. They figured out how to moved about. They figured out how crash into the fence in front of them, painstakingly try and turn around (crashing into the houses they were in between at least a dozen times while they were about it), figured out how to get onto the road, and drive off down the road (and the sidewalk). They didn't figure out how to brake.

The neighbors were rather worried now, but they didn't do very much about it. They tried that old assuming trick, noting that both of the the strange people had come out of the Poe's house, and it was _probably_ known that they were out taking the car for a spin. Some went back into their houses to watch some good old news and sip hot chocolate to get their minds off of things, and still others kept on shoveling snow.

Nicholas Fletcher and Sophia Murphy had watched the whole scene with interest and decided to go and tell the people inside their point of destination that their car had just been stolen.

Odin, Father of the Gods, looked at his companions with one narrow eye, holding the reigns of Sleipnir, his eight legged-horse, firmly as he stood before them.

"Now," he said solemnly, "you all know why we're here."

"No, actually," said Tyr. Tyr was a sturdy, brown-haired and square-jawed man2 who seemed to be middle-aged. He looked authoritative and commanding, like he should be going about leading things and settling matters and ordering people around, but for some reason wasn't.3 Right now he was looking at Odin a tad skeptically. Odin was certainly wise and all-knowing, but he had a tendency to never tell anyone what was going on in his wise and all-knowing head. The habit may have been due to him always assuming that everyone else always knew what was obvious to him. Or, alternatively, Tyr considered, it might have been because Odin had thought everyone else in the room at the moment was dim-witted and stupid, and he had simply decided to be arrogantly abrupt.

"What _are_ we here for?" asked Frey. He had a handsome face, long sandy hair pulled into a pony tail, and thin, dark eyebrows that were usually curved either in confusion or annoyance. Beside him, his extraordinarily beautiful sister with her own long tresses of gold was getting bored.

"Just typical," Thor muttered loud enough for everyone to hear. "I was just starting to settle in here, and now I expect we've got to move." Thor was a large man, expertly built, with icy blue eyes and an almost permanent scowl.

Frey cocked an eyebrow. "Just starting? Where've you been for the last few millennia?"

"Jupiter," he said, with a hint of pride. "The most brilliant sphere in the universe." His anger was quickly being replaced by eagerness. "Nothing but clouds and storm, all completely made of weather!"

"Sounds...fun," said Tyr. "Suits you."

"Teeth-grinder and Teeth-gnasher love it there!" he enthused. "Had to leave them there, of course, sure hope they're behaving themselves, old dogs!"

"I find your goats creepy," said Freyja tiredly. "Weird eyes. Awful breath."

"Well at least they're not a pair of tabby _cats_," he shot back, temper rising again. "Seriously, why would you choose _cats_?"

"I like cats!" protested Freyja. "Cats are special! They're...theyr'e...Come on, Frey, help me out!"

"...The cats _are_ kind of random, Freyja."

"Ugh! Why do I ask you anything?"

"I don't know. Why do you?"

"You're my brother, you're supposed to back me up in times of need."

"You call defending your flying cats a time of need?"

"Shut up."

"You have to admit, they're even stranger than Thor's goats."

"I'm ignoring you now."

"No you aren't."

"Yes I am!"

"No you aren't."

"Yes I am!"

Then Frey didn't bother responding this time, and they were left staring at Freyja for a moment in silence.

"Thor, didn't your hair used to be red?" Tyr asked, breaking the ice. Thor gave him a dark look.

"Yeah, what about it?"

"It's blonde now."

"So?"

"So..."

"The Mortals' perception of him changed, I'm sure," said Frigg, speaking up for the first time. She had reddish brown hair streaked with silver, curled sweetly and neatly around her head in an elderly, ladylike way. Her face was wrinkled and kind, but also looked endlessly tired.

Thor grunted.

"You know what I don't get?" Freyja said to the group at large. "I don't get why we have to meet up in a warehouse. Whenever something used to come up, we would meet at Urd's well and the Norns would see into the future for us and all that."

"You never see the Norns anymore. What happened to them?" asked Frey.

"I think they started up a girls' band in Denmark," said Frigg.

"Oh." Frey blinked. "I didn't know they played."

"What I still don't get is _why we're here at all_," Tyr interrupted.

"Because I called ya," said Heimdall gruffly and blearily, still a bit drunk. "That's why." Heimdall had rusty orange hair and a beard, with broad shoulders and freckled arms. His eyes were tiny dark beetles, peering and glinting.

"Well, why'd you call us, then?" asked Thor.

"'Cause I did!"

"Tell me why!"

"I don't know! The birds in the trees were singin' in a particular fine-tuned and melodic way, the trees were sounding just the right kind o' rustle as the wind blew through 'em, the wind was howling in precisely the correct direction, the air was smelling just enough like mothballs, and, well, the time seemed right!"

"_The time seemed right_?" Thor trembled angrily.

"Yeah!" Heimdall stood up groggily and faced him. "That's what I do! Perceive things and such!"

"I didn't come here to follow the hunch of a drunken gatekeeper!"

"Thor, dear, you're missing the whole point!" exclaimed Frigg. "What we want to know is _what caused _the conditions Heimdall perceived to be perfect."

"Heimdall is perceptive," said Odin. "He has the most acute senses of all the gods, even when he's as drunk as a lord. Frigg is clever, and can already infer that great things are afoot just by considering the conditions around us. But you, Thor, are an idiot."

"What's that s'posed to mean?"

"What do you mean, 'what's that s'posed to mean?' He called you an idiot! Idiot."

Thor turned on Frey and hurled his hulking sledgehammer at him, but Frey dodged expertly and gave him a smug grin. Thor howled with rage.

"I - AM - NOT - AN - IDIOT!"

"No need to get so worked up, Thor." Frey folded his arms. "There are worse things to be called."

Thor caught his hammer as it flew back to his hand.

"Where's your weapon?"

"What?"

"Where's that sword of yours? The one that can fight by itself 'cause you're too sissy to use it."

Frey gave him a look. "I let Skirnir have it, remember? So I could have darling Gerd."

"Well, fight with that stupid antler of yours, then!"

"I don't have it here."

"I'm not going to fight an unarmed man!"

"Then you won't fight at all."

"ARRRGGHH!"

"Oh, Thor, dear, you don't need to kill Frey just because he called you an idiot-"

"Frey! I can't believe you don't even have that stupid antler with you! What am I supposed to do if a six-headed monster comes out and jumps us, huh?"

"Just have your cats claw 'em!"

"You're going to make fun of my cats, too, Heimdall?"

"I thought I might as well join in the-"

"Would somebody PLEASE get to the point and tell me why we were called here?"

"Look, Thor, the antler wasn't completely stupid, I _did_ manage to kill a giant with it-"

"That giant was a wimp! I could've killed him with my bare hands if I-"

"SILENCE!" Odin shouted over them. The word was so loud and fierce and deep that even Thor shut up and paid attention.

By now, Odin had brought out his uncle Mimir's head and finished consulting with it.4 He wrapped it back up in its green linen sheet and stuffed it into Sleipnir's saddlebag.

"I ride to Valhalla tonight," he announced, "to lead the army of the slain into battle."

Freyja asked, "Against what?"

"The end of the world," said a smooth, cruel, and smiling voice behind them.

The other seven gods whipped around.

"Loki," whispered Odin darkly.

"Missed me?"

He was lithe and fairly built, with curled dark hair and a handsomely boyish face. He wore a suit. He was the trickster god, complete with mischievous smile.

Heimdall gave him a long, lazy stare. "I should never have let you into Asgard," he grumbled murderously.

"But why? I made an excellent guest. So excellent, in fact, Odin went ahead and made me his blood brother. Isn't that right, Odin?"

"You stole my hammer!" roared Thor.

"Your son tore off my hand!" yelled Tyr.

"You insulted my darling Gerd!" shouted Frey.

"You killed my son!" cried Frigg.

"You called me a witch!" Freyja whined.

"You betrayed us all," said Odin. "I thought Sladi had taken care of you."

"Turns out even the intestines of a god wear out after several millennia."

"Blast, it's Ragnarok!" Thor threw his hammer on the ground.

Loki's smile grew even broader. "Gotcha."

"Yes, all _right_, but I still don't understand what these things _do_ –"

Ponder sighed, with a heavy, measured, and practiced sound made only by those who have had a great deal of practice in dealing with people who never quite manage to understand what one has to say.

"It's really very simple, you see. It's right there in their names. Name. They are Auditors. They audit things. Well, really just one thing."

"Right," said Ridley, who was still feeling rather flustered. "The Universe, you said. I just don't understand how – _why_ –"

"There doesn't have to _be_ a why," interjected the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "They just _are_."

ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN.

There was a brief flash of the absence of light, and suddenly there was one more person sitting in the room. Well, not technically a person.

"Cor," said Pepper.

Adam looked at Death skeptically. "You look a bit shorter than I remember you bein'," he said accusingly.

HAVE WE MET?

"I believe so," said Aziraphale faintly.

"I would think, given the circumstances, that you would find it hard to forget," muttered Crowley.

WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES WERE THESE?

Aziraphale stared at the skeleton in amazement. "You must remember! Last summer, when…" his eyes flickered towards Adam.

"The Apocalypse that might have been?" Crowley prodded. "Ring a bell?"

YOU MUST HAVE THE WRONG PERSON.

"I don't think that's too likely," said Aziraphale.

"Azrael," said Adam suddenly. "That's the name. But you aren't him, are you."

NO.

"He's _our_ Death," Ponder cut in. "I assume that whoever you're talking about would be _your_ Death—"

AZRAEL. CREATION'S SHADOW.

"Yes, him-"

"Wait," interrupted Genevieve. "There are _multiple_ Deaths? And how are you even real, anyway? Death isn't a person!"

Death bowed his head, as if the question were one that he was used to hearing. I AM WHAT YOU WOULD CALL AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION. CALLED INTO EXISTENCE BY THE BELIEF OF HUMANITY.

"And the Auditors?" Charlotte asked. "Are they an … anthro-anthropo-"

"Anthropomorphic personification," helped Ponder, unhelpfully.

"Yes, thank you. That?"

NO. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE. THEY HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED, BEFORE HUMANITY.

"And what are they … what are they like?"

"Bloody annoying, that's what they are," one of the wizards interjected.

"Bunch of supercilious little buggers."

"Never appreciate a good meal."

"I believe the History Monks of the Order of Wen refer to them as _dhlang_," added Ponder. "They believe them to be a kind of demon."

"Demon, eh?" Newt nudged Crowley, and immediately winced in pain. "Sounds like your, uh, sphere of influence."

"Little-a auditors, yes. I remember inventing those myself. Or rather, importing the concept from Heaven. But big-A Auditors? I've never seen anything like them. Demons tend to be a little less, ah, conservative."

"I've heard them mentioned a few times in Heaven," said Aziraphale. "Not _extensively_, but … we were always taught that the Auditors were a sort of proto-demon, but they had been locked away long before to another universe – they weren't supposed to be able to exist _here_. Oh, there were stories every now and then of them interacting with people, being defeated with food, things like that, but we always considered them old cherubim's tales. Until three of them showed up in my bookstore."

ALWAYS THREE.

"Because three's the most powerful magic number, and all that?" Wensley hazarded a guess.

MAGIC? NO. THE AUDITORS ABHOR MAGIC. THEY ABHOR INDIVIDUALITY. IRREGULARITY. LIFE.

The room was very quiet.

THEY DESPISE, ABOVE ALL, HUMANITY. THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS, YOUR FEELINGS, YOUR PERCEPTIONS OF A WORLD WHICH EXISTS BEYOND THE PURELY PERCEIVABLE.

"Have they ever … killed anyone?" The question was uttered by Charlotte, but it was on the minds of every Earthling in the room.

CERTAIN LAWS IN OUR WORLD PREVENT THEM FROM MEDDLING DIRECTLY, BUT THEY HAVE TRIED – TRIED TO END HUMANITY.

"They tried to kill _me_," Ridley said.

It was at this moment that Nicholas Fletcher and Sophia Murphy arrived at the door, with Archie the Talking Guinea Pig and the news that a couple of nutters had made away with someone's car.

_**Jin Ah:**__This is probably my favorite chapter so far. The Wizards interacting with each other and everyone else, the misadventures of Murgatroyd and Stanley, and the further introduction of the Norse Gods and the event that they have assembled to witness: Ragnarok. I hope anyone reading this is enjoying it as much as we are, and if you have any comments or suggestions, reviews would be greatly appreciated!_

1The sofa, however, had learned enough about Aziraphale to know that it could relax if _he_ sat on it, which once resulted in Aziraphale having his hand stuck in Crowley's sofa for three hours. See, Aziraphale had sat down first, promptly dropped his car keys in the annoying crevice between the two cushions, and had started digging for them - but Crowley had sat down at that point, and the sofa had immediately stiffened up. Aziraphale had been too polite to interrupt Crowley's heated spiel about the absolute _morons_ Hell had assigned to be in charge of him this time, Crowley had been to incensed to notice that Aziraphale's "Hmms," and "Yes, I sees," were even less interested than usual, and the sofa had been too frightened to risk softening up a little.

2With a missing hand. Like most people who are missing appendages, Tyr wasn't often mocked for his injury - not because of pity, as in most earthly cases, but because he was a Norse God who was fully capable of making _you_ lose an appendage, as well.

3He actually had been Chief of the Aesir Gods at one time, but long ago had decided he might as well step back when Odin was inevitably going to become way more awesome than him anyway.

4Odin's uncle Mimir was actually the reason he only had one eye. Mimir was the wisest living being in Asgard and the one who kept Mimir's well, whose water would give any who drank it Mimir's wisdom. Odin, of course, wanted in on this action, and so sacrificed an eye to Mimir in order to get a sip. When Mimir was beheaded, Odin had been devastated, and worked night and day to bring back to life the head of his favorite uncle. He succeeded of course, and since then asked it for advice whenever he needed it. This impressed some gods, but deeply disturbed others.


End file.
